Category / Conferences

by Kevin Ragsdale

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!

by Kevin Ragsdale

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

by Kevin Ragsdale

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!

 

 

 

by Kevin Ragsdale

Shameless Self-Promotion

I’ll be presenting the “Easy Multithreading with Visual FoxPro” session I did at Southwest Fox 2011 at the Atlanta FoxPro Users Group on June 21, 2012.

Next Thursday (June 21), I’ll be speaking at the Atlanta FoxPro Users Group meeting. I’ll be presenting the “Easy Multithreading with Visual FoxPro” session I did at Southwest Fox 2011.

Since I’ve done the session at Southwest Fox,  Detroit Area Fox Users Group and the Chicago FoxPro Users and Developers Group, I reckon it’s time to “retire” the session from “the road” after Atlanta.

So, in the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting the slides, code and whitepaper for the session.

If you haven’t seen the session, here’s a quick little “promotional” video for it (with tongue planted firmly in cheek).