Soutwest Fox - Key Note

148 attendees
16 speakers


By a show of hands, it looks like about 15 0r 20% of the attendees were at their first-ever VFP conference. About 1/2 of the attendees were at their first Southwest Fox conference.


Rick spent some time talking about SP2 explaining that this release has bug fixes and report designer enhancements. He also pointed out that Microsoft released 2 versions of SP2 because the first one didn't quite have the right splash screen. Doug then mentioned that if you have SP1 installed, you should uninstall VFP9 and then install SP2.

Rick then explained that Sedna is different and separate from SP2 and detailed the components of Sedna. Microsoft still hasn't announced a release date for Sedna. It will be released on CodePlex.

Demos

Christof Wollenhaupt first demoed a little VFP application he wrote to learn foreign languages and talked about how it would be cool if VFP could be used to build and deploy applications to other platforms such as pocket pc's and Linux Devices. Then he showed how to use his Guineu application to deploy VFP apps to other platforms. He demoed this language app on the Pocket PC, Linux, SQL Server stored procedures. Check out http://www.guineu.net/ for information.

Then Toni Feltman showed tools from eTecnologia: .Net Extender and .NET Compiler for VFP. In the first example she showed a VFP form then when run used .NET controls on the VFP form. In design mode, all you really see is a place holder, but you have access to the full functionality of the .NET controls. Toni then talked about the Compiler which is also still a work in progress, but shows great potential. See http://www.etecnologia.net/ for more information

I'm sure I have this next part all wrong:

Next up were Alan Stevens and Craig Boyd to talk about a Super Secret Project. Alan mentioned again that "Your code is not obsolete" his mantra for the weekend. Alan and Craig are working with Ken Levy on a way to build applications out of Visual Studio! Craig, in his typical way, raced through his explanations with passion and then showed us something called "VFP Studio 2008" He talked about "isolated shell projects" in Visual Studio. Craig showed a VS "New Project" dialog and said we'll be able to create VFP projects in VS. Craig and Alan stressed that this is based on technology that they just received from Microsoft on Monday. They said that this new technology, the isolated shell, is separate from Visual Studio and doesn't require a license to Visual Studio.

This lead into them talking about Click Once technology - for VFP! They also talked about "reg free COM" and how we can use VFP to create applications that work with Vista's new security issues.

The Keynote finished with the following calls to action:

• Download SP2 and Sedna
• Join VFPX
• Start a Blog
• Something else that I didn't see before Doug moved slides!