I’ll be speaking on “REAL Studio for the VFP Developer”. As all of you know, I love me some Visual Foxpro. The Visual Foxpro development team has done an incredible job with that product over the many many years of it’s active development. Thank you Fox Software! And yes, a big ‘Thank You’ to MicroSoft for version 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and (especially) 9 of Visual Foxpro! Many, many sincere gratitudes go out to all of the VFPX developers as well keeping the progress of the open-sourced parts of Foxpro going! The hard labors of genius developers are moving Foxpro forward.

So, what you won’t hear at my presentation in May is that I want you to abandon Visual Foxpro for REAL Studio.

What you will hear, is that I do think you should add REAL Studio to your development toolbox. I found that my Visual Foxpro skills and Visual Foxpro mindset is a natural fit for the REAL Studio development environment. I find that joy in development that I have doing Visual Foxpro, I can also have in REAL Studio.

What I’ll be going over in the presentation:

• How VFP and REAL Studio compare
• What are the strengths of REAL Studio
• What are the weaknesses of REAL Studio
• Development ‘gotchas’ in REAL Studio
• How to build a desktop application from scratch
• How to call one window from another
• How to access databases
• How to create and run a report
• How to build for target Linux, Mac and Windows platforms
• A small bit about building Web Applications with REAL Studio
• More!

If you are in the Detroit area, on Thursday May 12th, please stop in and say ‘hello’!

I’m very unsatisfied with my answer. In the end, the “I don’t know” and “We’ll never know” is the ultimate answer but lets take a closer look at why that is the case.

Let me start off by saying that I have only ever purchased one copy of Visual Foxpro. One. Ever. So I get counted as “1“. To make matters worse, I believe that version was Visual Foxpro 9.0 when it was first released and I got some sort of huge discount at the time. I admit that I have been a professional Foxpro and Visual Foxpro developer since about 1992 and I have only purchased one version of Visual Foxpro and it was one of the last versions that Microsoft has published. I will posit that I have been a legal Foxpro owner all along.

The ultimate reason is how Foxpro and Visual Foxpro was sold. In the early days Foxpro was sold stand alone. All of those years, each company that I was employed with purchased a copy of Foxpro per developer. I wasn’t the independent consultant at that time. At that time, counts of Foxpro developers were possible.

Once Visual Foxpro 5.0 came along, it was bundled with Visual Studio. Yes, you could purchase Visual Foxpro stand-alone but it made best financial sense to just purchase all of Visual Studio. By Microsoft’s own admission, they didn’t count a sale of Visual Studio as a ‘user’ of Foxpro. However, if I recall correctly they *did* count them as users of Visual Basic.

Soon, Microsoft came out with their MSDN subscription which basically was a mountain of CDs of every OS, development tool, and piece of software produced by Microsoft. To have a years worth of updates for Windows, SQL Server along with Foxpro was very appealing. Again, many many developers and companies purchased the MSDN subscription and the Foxpro developers went uncounted.

By the time I went on my own as an independent consultant, Microsoft has the ‘Empower’ program. It was basically the MSDN program but for small business owners and software developers intent on creating and selling software products. I subscribed to that for many years and was never counted as a Foxpro developer.

Lets take a look for a moment at Foxpro itself. Foxpro doesn’t require registration with Microsoft. It doesn’t phone home. There is a way to report errors back to Microsoft, but that’s optional. Most of the time, I don’t report my Foxpro crashes/errors back to Microsoft. Bottom line, is that Foxpro can be pirated without Microsoft knowing. China is a huge user of Foxpro based on some indicators but their sales of Foxpro is almost non-existant. Not too many sales of Microsoft products in China either. There are a lot of Foxpro developers in Russia and the Eastern European countries.

Heck, there’s a lot of Foxpro developers all over the world. The database power, and low system requirements of VFP make it a great low, middle, and high power development tool.

Being a member of the Atlanta Foxpro Users Group, I know there are hundreds and hundreds (if not thousands) of Foxpro developers in Georgia alone … but we never see them. We’ll see people who have lost their job, they come to one meeting, get a new job even programming with Foxpro, and we never see them again. Frustrating. Don’t programmers want to work on developing their skills in their ‘art’?!?!

I digress.

Is there a way to count Foxpro developers? I don’t think so. We’re many but we’ll never know how many. Any other ideas on how to get a true count of Visual Foxpro developers?

I must say that I haven’t ever seen this one before. I’m transitioning from an XP Pro machine to a new Vista machine. I’m now trying to debug through a VCX and … this. What gives?!?!

SW Fox Conference

Kevin Ragsdale, FoxForward “Best Presenter” winner, is running for congress.  His top priority just happens to be my top priority for this election: our budget crisis.

I’ll be keeping my eye out to see what Kevin’s stance is on the Fair Tax legislation.  There’s nothing like bringing Trillions of dollars back into the US economy and giving power back to the people, like the Fair Tax.

Good luck Kevin!!!  Give ‘em heck!

I am very proud of FoxForward, and I am awe struck by the talented speakers that presented at the conference. I also learned a lot from the attendees as well. They came from all walks of life, and with a variety of backgrounds and experiences.

Unfortunately the toll that the conference took on by business and personal life was too great. The conference took over one months full time effort. For a small business, and a father of two home schooled boys, I just couldn’t justify the loss of income for the effort.

Another aspect is that FoxForward 2007 wasn’t significantly larger than FoxForward 2006. I must admit it was a bit disappointing. I guess that the “diverse” technological topics aren’t of that much interest, as I thought it would be. Okay, enough reflection.

I am pleased to see some very positive announcements for the VFP community. FoxRockx has been announced and is shipping. I expect every one of you to subscribe. VFPx continues to impress! The people involved are cranking out some extremely impressive stuff. Check it out. And of course, SW Fox is bigger and better than evar!

So, even if there isn’t going to be a VFP 10, the Fox development team has enabled us to control our own future. If we work hard, support our community, and take ownership of Visual Foxpro and it’s future, we’ll be able to keep doing what we love to do long into the future!

Very funny Doug!!!  LOL!

F(@*$($(*&*#(*$$*#()@)

I’m so happy I’m getting off the M$ B$.

Here’s my favorite quote that I think says it all: “It’s something that will change software development…”

Of course this is a gem too:
“… a lot of business logic can be done in a declarative form. Now, we haven’t totally proven this yet. We’re doing a lot of internal developments ourselves that way,…” Guessing, and dreaming, and hoping. He went so far as calling it a “quest”. I’m surprised he didn’t call it a *crusade*.

Bill’s looking for churn. Churn generates money.

1. Does this mean that .NET is dead?
2. Will declarative languages help me make better programs, or just write less code?
3. Will declarative languages help me write programs faster, or just write less code?
4. Will declarative languages allow me to earn a living? or is the intent to get the power of programming into end user hands? (On the plus side, I’ve had plenty of jobs converting and re-doing Access systems which similarly were to place the power of programming into end user hands.)

I guess I’ll have to dust off my Prolog skills in a decade, eh? I’m thinking … no.

A.B.S :: Anything But MicroSoft. I think I’m justified when I hear lips flapping such as this.

I’m riled up now!!!

We’re lucky to have a very active Foxpro Users Group here in Atlanta. http://afug.com I think we continue to be successful because of our group effort. Russell Campbell is a great president, partly because he never gives up. He just keeps going. He’s the Energizer bunny of VFP.

I take care of the web site, meeting notices, and postings to the other web sites. One switch that I’ve made to the web site (a couple of years ago now) is to keep all of the past meeting notices on the web site. They used to be deleted. This helps with our search engine placement. If you type in “Atlanta” and “Foxpro”, our site is pretty sure to come up close to the top. This helps the group generate job leads from employers and head hunters. They pay $25 a pop, and Russell sends out a broadcast email to all of the attendees. Not only is this a money maker for the group, but it is a great service to the attendees and keeps them coming back.

Again, we have a good core group to our team and we switch off presenting. We also find great topics and speakers in what I like to call “parking lot talk”. This discussion in the parking lots after the meeting are more important (sometimes) than the presentation material. Often times we’ll say something like “That’s really cool. Sounds like a great topic for a future presentation.” That’s how we get our best topics and presentations. It’s that easy. Of course, in Atlanta, we normally have good weather for parking lot talk, year round.

For getting presenters and topics, one approach that does not work, is calling out saying “Hey! We need a topic for next month. Who wants to do it?!?” No takers. Calling out saying “Please consider being a presenter for AFUG.” This gets people thinking. When approached in the parking lot, they’re more open to be a presenter.

AFUG also “takes care” of their presenters. Bill Woody, AFUG Secretary, prints up a nice certificate, gets all of the attendees to sign it during the presentation, puts it in a nice (cheap) frame, and we give it to the presenters at the end of the presentation. If it wasn’t in a frame, it’d end up in the bottom of one of my drawers. Because its in a frame, and signed, I proudly tack them onto my wall. I’ve got seven of them across my wall. I look at them, and look at the signatures, and think fondly back on the good times I’ve had at AFUG. It’s crazy, but this small gesture keeps AFUG in my mind and makes me more likely to present in the future. These certificates are on my wall next to my MCP certificate and my “Honorary Officer Of the Starship Enterprise” certificate. Ah, good times, good times.

Recently, we lost our AFUG location. We used to be out of New Horizons that had free space, and computers and projectors for us. They were moving, and they were starting night courses. That left no space for AFUG. We searched and searched for space. We had heard that other FUGs met at restaurants. We have tried a couple and they each had their pluses and minuses. We’ve settled on KC Pit BBQ location because it has several great “features”:

1. Free meeting room – yes, this is a tough requirement

2. Private meeting room

3. Central location – Atlanta is huge and people come from all over. A central location is a must, as we learned the hard way.

4. Reasonably priced food – VFP developers aren’t all rolling in the money. I’m one of those low rent kinda developers.

5. Variety of food – Vegetarians can be anyone and anywhere. It’s worth being sensitive to their needs. Yes, even a BBQ house has something for anyone.

6. Power – Curiously, computers need power. I typically bring extension cords and power strips not only for the presenter, but for the attendees too.

7. Internet access – A luxury but a nice one. Some people will hesitate to attend if Internet access isn’t available. This is a tough requirement.

8. Free/good parking – A must for me. It burns me to pay for parking. This rules out most of downtown Atlanta, unfortunately.

9. Projector – This location has a high-def TV that we use as a monitor. Otherwise we have borrowed Dave Bernard’s projector. We really need to purchase one for the group however. It’s not nice to burn Dave’s bulb hours with no compensation.

I’ve been doing my best to record the audio of our presentations. It takes a while to edit down the audio, remove the waiter’s coming and going, and to take out all of our cuss words. Yes, we’re a colorful lot and that means salty language to describe some of our leading edge technology. I post them as MP3 files onto the AFUG site. I’ve heard of members that couldn’t make the meeting listening to the audio and appreciating that it was available.

Guest speakers: We’re lucky that we have some funds to fly in a guest speaker. Of course it really helps that YAG has some family and friends in Atlanta and he contacts us when he’s passing through.

In the end, it’s the group effort that keeps us going: Russell Campbell of Interthink, Bill Woody, Dave Bernard of The Intellection Group, Piper Cohen, Bo Durban of Moxie Data, and many more.

That’s it. I hope that the existing Foxpro Users Groups keep up the good fight. Don’t give up Cathy. We need Foxpro Users Groups now, more than ever!