Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund

One of my best highlights of last years Southwest Fox conference was meeting Emerson Reed. Emerson is the creator of the ThemedControls suite on VFPx, a stunning set of visual controls which provide a modern UI for Visual FoxPro applications.

He is also one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Every minute I spent with Emerson at the conference was a great pleasure for me, and I’m very thankful for the opportunity to have met him in person.

Emerson attended the conference as the first Ceil Silver Ambassador to Southwest Fox, representing the Brazilian FoxPro Community, and he truly was a wonderful ambassador.

If you’ve never heard of the Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund, here’s some info from the Southwest Fox Website:

The Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund brings a developer to the Southwest Fox conference as an ambassador for the developers in his or her country. This gives the recipient the opportunity to meet and share experiences with developers attending Southwest Fox and gives other attendees the opportunity to learn about VFP development in the recipient’s country. The Fund is financed by contributions from the VFP community, and from Geek Gatherings.

The Fund is named in memory of Ceil Silver, a long-time member of the Visual FoxPro community, who passed away in January, 2009. Ceil served as Editor of FoxPro Advisor’s Tips and Tricks column for many years and was the founder of the Westchester County FoxPro chapter of PADD, the Professional Association of Database Developers. She was also a contributing author to Special Edition Using Visual FoxPro 6. Ceil understood the value of attending professional conferences, and continued to attend them until her failing health prevented it.

At the conference, Emerson showed off the ThemedControls during one of the Show Us Your App sessions, including a new Office 2007-style ribbon control. Everyone in the audience was amazed at the capabilities of the ThemedControls.

He also spent a lot of time answering questions from me. I’m sure I sounded like a total hack with some of the questions, but he was always gracious and patient, and never turned me away.

When he showed the Ribbon control, he asked for help from the community in developing it. I told him I’d love to help. Unfortunately, thanks to limited time and resources (and by resources I mean ability on my part), I’ve sadly been zero help at all.

So if you have a hankering to help, please contact Emerson via his blog or the CodePlex site.

Emerson Reed – Southwest Fox 2009 (From Emerson’s Blog)

This year there will be TWO Ceil Silver Ambassadors at Southwest Fox: César Chalom (from Brazil) and Bernard Bout (from Australia).

Both César and Bernard are active bloggers on Foxite, and both have done tremendous work with GDIPlusX and showing us how to move our Visual FoxPro apps into the 21st century.

Emerson, César and Bernard truly put the “Visual” in Visual FoxPro.

César also created the FoxCharts (on VFPx) and FoxyPreviewer (a separate project on CodePlex). Both are sensational reminders of what is possible with VFP.

I’m really looking forward to meeting (and learning from) both of them this October.

Updated: 11:32AM – Rick Schummer pointed out that FoxyPreviewer is not a VFPx project. It is a separate project on CodePlex. Thanks, Rick!