FoxForward - Day 1

I went down and picked up my name tag, conference book and various other goodies from Kevin Cully's wife, Kim, and joined the crowd for the "Get to know you session" over beer, cheese, crackers and cookies. I had a chance to chat with Dave Bernard, Michael Babcock, Ed Leafe, Kevin Ragsdale, Kevin Cully and others.

Kevin Ragsdale opened with part one of a two part "VFP 101 Crash Course" which I've heard was very good from at least one attendee. It was described as "how to be a 10-year veteran in 3 hours" by this attendee.

I'd seen Dave's session on "Instrumenting your application" so I took advantage of the time to practice my session a little more. I really needed the time because I rebuilt my machine from scratch late this week and hadn't actually tested every example. (I know, I broke a cardinal rule for speakers.)

So, I worked through my examples and everything was going great until I fired up one VFP form and the installer dialog popped up. I don't have any idea what I needed, but I'm sooo glad that I brought my MSDN disks with me.

I did come down to see Stein Goering's Web Connection Revisited. Stein did a great job of walking us through version 5. Some of the highlights include Rick's integration with Visual Studio's IDE for easier building of pages. Actually - it looks just as if you were working on a ASP.NET page with a C# or VB code behind page - except that the code behind page is a PRG! Way cool.

Stein walked through several aspects of Rick Strahl's framework including security. He also talked about Rick's "panels" which can be made visible or not through code. (In this case he showed how a user's details were not visible until after the proper credentials were supplied.)

Stein mentioned that the new framework is very backward compatible and indicated that he brought forward his entire code-base which he started in 1997. He said it only took him 2-3 hours to convert the entire application.

I couldn't count how many times Stein said "Rick makes this easy"

Late Evening Session

After the session we all walked across the parking lot to the Loafing Leprechaun that did a really great job of taking care of us - and even provided separate checks for everyone. There were at least 30 of us, maybe more and one waitress took care of the whole crowd. (I think, anyway)

The conversation was great - as it usually is at a VFP conference. I sat with Dave Bernard, Alan Stevens (whom I hadn't met before), Michael Babcock and Brandon Harker. I particularly enjoyed hearing Dave's ideas on the future of his company and some of his clients. I also enjoyed talking with Alan about his Unit Testing session, which unfortunately is scheduled opposite my session. (I thought i might get a chance to see it yet since he's added a second session to fill an opening created by a speaker that couldn't be here. Unfortunately - it is opposite me again!) Fortunately I'm already signed up to see him present it as a pre-conference session at Southwest Fox.

I left a bit earlier than some of the others so that I could walk through my sample code one last time.