Southwest Fox 2015 Speakers and Sessions

Speakers and sessions for the Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ conferences have been announced!

The Southwest Fox 2015 Conference has fewer speakers and tracks this year (eight and two, respectively), but there is a chance that more speakers could be added, depending on the number of registrations by July 1st.

The list of speakers for 2015 is impressive:

  • Toni Feltman
  • Tamar Granor
  • Doug Hennig
  • Cathy Pountney
  • Rick Schummer
  • Phil Sherwood
  • Rick Strahl
  • Christof Wollenhaupt

You can view specific session details at the Southwest Fox 2015 Sessions page. Two sessions I’m really interested in are Tamar’s “Can’t This Application Go Any Faster?” and Doug’s “50 Shades of Grey: Whipping Your Application’s UI Into Shape“.

Southwest Fox 2015 is the only Visual FoxPro developer’s conference in North America. If you’ve never been, I highly recommend making an effort to go this year.  It’s a great learning experience, shared with fellow Visual FoxPro developers.

A few of the Southwest Xbase++ sessions for 2015 have piqued my interest, too.

The conferences will be held October 15-18 at the SanTan Elegante Conference Center in beautiful Gilbert, Arizona.

Registration starts June 1st, with the same registration fee as last year!

I’m looking forward to going this year. Hope to see you there!

I Need Some SUBSTR() Help, Please!

Last week, I presented a session titled, “Unicode Made Easier with SQLite” at the Southwest Fox 2014 conference.

At the end of the session, an attendee asked about manipulating strings, specifically using SUBSTR() on UTF-8 encoded strings.

Last night, I played around with creating my own SUBSTR() function to deal with UTF-8 encoded strings, and I think I may have been successful, but I’m not sure.

If there are any readers that can tell me if the image below looks correct for a SUBSTR(2,3) on the Russian phrase in the textbox, I would appreciate it very much.

On the other hand, if you think I’m going down a rabbit hole that doesn’t need to be traveled, please let me know.  I would hate to think I’ve wasted time “substringing” a phrase for which there is really no need for “substringing.”

Thank you in advance for any help!

Image of substr example

SUBSTR() on UTF-8 data

Southwest Fox 2014

There’s only a few days left…

Registration for Southwest Fox 2014 and Southwest Xbase++ 2014 is open, and there’s only a few days left to save $125  and receive a free half-day pre-conference session.

Pre-conference sessions are three-hours long, which provide a great opportunity to dive deeper into the session topic.

There are four pre-conference sessions for Southwest Fox 2014:

  • Desktop to the Web? No Need to Eat that Elephant in One Bite (Bo Durban)
  • Lessons Learned: SQL Server (Christof Wollenhaupt)
  • PostgreSQL vs Microsoft SQL Server (Frank Perez)
  • Web APIs: Getting Paid, Making Calls and Other Cool Tricks (Steve Bodnar)

Pre-conference sessions for Southwest Xbase++ 2014 include Frank’s and Steve’s sessions above, and:

  • eXpress++ Pre-Conference Workshop (Roger Donnay)
  • Xbase++ 2.0 Workshop (Steffan Pirsig)

I’m very excited to be coming back this year. It will be my first trip back to Southwest Fox since 2011. I’ll be presenting two conference sessions: More Multi-threading with Visual FoxPro, and Easier Unicode with SQLite.

Remember, just a few more days are left to save some money and receive a free pre-conference session, so visit the registration page today to learn more about these awesome conferences!

 

 

 

Online FoxPro Users Group Meeting – Tuesday, December 17th

UPDATE: The meeting was recorded and is available on the OFUG YouTube Channel

OFUG (Online Visual FoxPro Users Group) meets Tuesday, December 17th, at 8:30PM (EST). If you’re not sure what time that is in your time zone, you can find it here.

Doug Hennig will present “Unit Testing”, which I believe he recently presented at German DevCon.

I know many people will be planning to see the Anchorman Double Feature on Tuesday night, but I recommend attending OFUG on Tuesday and waiting to see Anchorman 2.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and Doug will do the entire presentation as Ron Burgandy.

More about OFUG (Online FoxPro Users Group)