Introduction - by Claudio Lassala
The life for those who work with Visual FoxPro in Brazil is not that easy. There is a lack of content in Portuguese, just a few courses, books, just the UTMag/RapoZine magazine in Portuguese, and there is no localized version of VFP in Portuguese.
Due to economic problems, it is impossible for a Brazilian to travel to the US in order to attendee a DevCon, Essential Fox or Whilfest.
In May 2002, thanks to Ademir Provenzi's initiative, we have realized a conference in Rio Grande do Sul, put together in less than fifteen days, for 30 attendees. Two months after that, a new conference took place in Minas Gerais' State, organized by Marco Antonio and Breno Viana, which had 46 attendees. In September 20-21-22, it was time for the State of São Paulo to host this conference, which I had the honor to organize, as this is my city.
In the last four months, we had 3 conferences, gathering a total of 150 attendees, which were extremely glad with this possibility of getting in touch with VFP topics so exciting such as XML, OOP, N-Tier, ASP.NET, Web Services, Voodoo Web Controls, FoxWeb, Client/Server, Migration from Clipper, MCP certification with exam in VFP. Attendees also had the chance to network and make contact with developers from all over the country.
Considering the launch of Visual Studio.NET on the PDC 2002 in Brazil, which has gathered 700 attendees, it was not that bad to have 150 attendees in a fully dedicated Visual FoxPro event.
And just a few days after the DevCon 2002, Brazil might be the first country after the US to introduce VFP 8 Beta during Microsoft Brazil. It seems the fox likes our tropical weather!
But, before that, we invite you to read this article to know more about that event.
First day (September 9) - by Paulo César Carneiro
Opening - by Eduardo Vidigal
Early in the morning, before the gates of the place got opened, we began to introduce ourselves, exchanging some information while waiting for the beginning of the event, and Eduardo Vidigal was taking a photo for each attendee with a digital camera connected to his laptop and we got our credentials.
Moments after that, Vidigal gave the welcome to everyone, remembering that he had started with a small group of 5 users, and after the joint between his own website and the one from Claudio Cuoco, they created FoxBrasil User Group, which nowadays has more than 680 members. And today, we are at this great event, prepared for 60 attendees but ended up with 73 registrations. Vidigal then passed the word to Claudio Lassala.
Keynote 1 - Visual FoxPro: Present and Future - by Claudio Lassala
Claudio Lassala (Microsoft MVP) did a very good-humoured introduction of the attendees, with a VFP app (of course), using the MS Agent (the genius), showing the photos Vidigal took at the entrance of the event for each of them.
Then, he started his presentation with the following questions:
The answer came by two videos: one from Steve Balmer and another from Craig Symonds. Claudio showed also a VFP 7 Promotional Video from the Universal Thread.
He highlighted the evolution of VFP in Brazil since last year. He said that we established a more mature relationship with Microsoft, with the help shown by Leonardo Tolomelli:
Claudio announced that he is leaving Brazil but that he has plans to come to Brazil at least once a year and participate in a 4-days conference, for at least 150 attendees, with cutting-edge technology related to VFP. He also announced that he will continue to help the Visual FoxPro community. He finished sending his thanks to several friends who provided some nice support: Giba, Paulino, Vidigal, Walfrans, Rodolfo Duarte, Paulo César Carneiro, FoxBrasil User Group in General, Michel Fournier, Leonardo Tolomelli and Ken Levy.
Keynote 2 - .NET Platform, Web Services and Visual FoxPro - by Leonardo Tolomelli (Microsoft)
Leonardo started his presentation saying that currently all of the development tools from the company is able to build and consume Web Services. He mentioned that VFP was the first official release (with VFP 7) ready to the Web Services. Then he followed with this slide:
Leonardo told us also about his contact with the Fox community, saying that he had some troubles on the launch of VFP 6, where the attendees didn't have enough room to sit at Microsoft Brazil's conference room, because the number of attendees has exceeded by far the estimation.
After that, he said something about ASP.NET and Web Matrix, and how the Web Services can provide information for several devices to customers: Pocket PC, Table PC, X-Box, cell phones, etc...
He showed also two videos about Web Services: one about Helmet's production and the other one about a study case in Brazil using .NET technology: TECBAN. Leonardo asked the collaboration from the community for the Sharepedia. He also told us about an agreement with the Brazilian government with Microsoft about digital certificates. At the end, he gave us an exciting news:
"On October 15, 2002, from 2PM until 6PM, it will be presented at the MS Brazil's headquarter, the VFP 8 Beta, less than 15 days after its presentation at DevCon, Fort Lauderdale - Florida."
I talked a lot with Leonardo and he gave me all the attention he could. We talked about the needs of our Fox community, about MSDN subscriptions and about having special prices for Brazilian developers.
Session 1 - Visual FoxPro and Client/Server - by Leandro Walfrans Esteves
Leandro presented the concept of Client/Server, talking about the traditional architecture, where all the data goes through the network and the data filtering is done at the client. In a Client/Server architecture, just the required data goes through the network. All the processing is done on the server.
How to develop Client/Server with VFP? 3 techniques:
Remote View - pros:
Remote View - cons:
Pass-Through - pros:
Pass-Through - cons:
ADO - pros:
ADO - cons:
What is the best technique? Walfrans mentioned that this decision depends on the application. And the best suggestion is to merge all the techniques, extracting the best of each one.
Walfrans ran several demos, accessing a SQL-SERVER with all the techniques, mentioning what was exposed during the session.
By then, the agenda was running late. However, all the attendees were paying attention to everything being shown, because all of that is of common interest. Then, a little break for a coffee was well appreciated.
Session 2 - Developing solutions with XML and Visual FoxPro - by Fábio Vazquez
This was the most awaited session of the day, because we should hear about that a lot: XML Fábio started this presentation showing some theory:
Fábio told us a brief history from HTML to XML. He said that the need to exchange information didn't find a good place in HTML as its main purpose is just to display data. We have been using EDI, but it doesn't have a defined standard. The XML came bringing the specifications we needed.
The XML has the flexibility and power to be read in any operational system. The XML is a meta-language, as its serves to define other languages. We call those languages as vocabularies. This is used to create structured documents. What can I do with XML? With this slide Fábio started to show the advantages of using XML:
Fábio also said that XML is present in almost all the products from Microsoft.
Fábio talked about the structure of an XML document:
XML let us define our own Tags. Fábio explained every single piece of an XML document.
Sometime around 5:30 pm, we asked for a coffee-break. We were tired (but not less excited). We came back to work at 6h00 pm until 8h00 pm. It means that we had more than four hours with a session fully-dedicated to XML.
Fábio showed several demos, using Notepad, VS.Net and VFP, showing how we can use all that theory presented on the first part of the session. He said something about the built-in functions: XMLTOCURSOR and CURSORTOXML, and also about the "in-line" schema of the CURSORTOXML function, and its restrict action from within VFP apps, because it adds the schema to the XML document.
Then, he showed some routines using the MSXML Parser. We learned from him that the CURSORTOXML function doesn't use the parser, but the XMLTOCURSOR does. He taught us that the MSXML Parser is installed together with Internet Explorer 5 or later.
Fábio made some considerations about DOM (Document Object Model), XPATH and XSLT, and more, but at 8h00 pm, I couldn't write anymore. So Fábio opened room for questions. The place was filled with good humor, and every now and then someone made some joke about the book on VFP and XML that Fábio was releasing.
I would like to tell that I knew two attendees who also has attended two DevCons: Augusto and Rubens Corrêa. They both said that the event is terrific. Rubens told us that he was at four DevCons and is always excited when telling people about it. Augusto told us that he is willing to go back to a DevCon, but to witness some session presented by Claudio Lassala.
Second day (September 21) - by Cléber Ferrari
Today is the second day of the conference. The weather out there is common for people from Sao Paulo City, a little cold, raining a little bit. Today was easier to arrive at the hotel, because despite of the fact that Sao Paulo never stops, on Saturdays the traffic is not so heavy.
Yesterday a joke came up: Leandro Walfrans always says that he could not live without a cursor, and now I'm still thinking about this, in the XML, and on the terrific pizza I had at dinner! At the hotel, some attendees who were not from Sao Paulo, were claiming about the weather. Well, we live in a country that has a large variety of weather. Our agenda for today is promising to make the day very hot! We will have OOP, Migration from Clipper to VFP, and at end with the day, N-Tier. Some people are still thinking about the terrific session presented by Fábio Vazquez about XML.
Before the sessions started, I talked with Iurih Cherly about his email to FoxBrasil User Group, with a tip about how we can create a PowerPoint presentation from within VFP. We were highlighting the huge capabilities of VFP and the big amount of articles and solutions found at Microsoft's web site and very often we didn't know them. We were wondering: it does exist a web service that could search at Microsoft to find solutions? If someone knows or have more information about this, email me at ferrari@coloil.com.br.
The first session is a partnership between Claudio Lassala and Fábio Vazquez to talk about OOP (Object Oriented Programming).
Session 3: Object Oriented Programming and Visual FoxPro
by Claudio Lassala and Fábio Vazquez
I think the topic is very interesting and I was anxious with this session. Lassala started highlighting the question that OOP is a concept that exists since approximately 30 years, and it relates to the way we think about the development of an application. I see that this is going to be difficult for a lot of people. It was made clear during all the sessions that we need to be, live and breath OOP! This is going to be the basis for several other concepts and technologies.
We understood that a software must be OOP since the first idea of proposal. Vazquez highlighted also that need to think in OOP even at the very beginning of a conversation with a vendor or customer! Oops, I think I need to re-think my concepts.
How to think OOP? The customer ordered a product. The Product is moved on the stock. So, it does exists a "client" object that makes "orders" and there is a "product" object, that is moved on the stock.
Some points to think about:
So, we're basically talking about re-education of our developers.
Another point is to verify questions related to "Best Practices". And another rules that we need to pay attention to:
And here it appeared a small discussion about how we can apply this in our real world. What can we do when we have a working application, installed on several terminals, and the customer ask you to make all the forms to have a green background? Let's see:
It's not good to create sub-classes just for this client, and our friend Moshe reminded us that we can open the SCX file with a simply USE command, and then just change the Baseclass of each object.
We could have a setting file with some parameters that could be loaded at the launch of the app, but would this be 100% OOP?
Everybody agreed that both options could be used. Well, our VFP brings this amazing capability: merge solutions, concepts, technologies! For almost every problem, we have more than one solution. This grants power to us, but can also bring damage if the developer do not run into a good planning.
It was also highlighted the UML as a standard for documentation. And talking about documentation, I was reading the article published at UTMag/RapoZine #16, written by Cláudio Lassala and Fábio Vazquez under the title "Coverage of PDC 2002 in Brazil", where in the page 47 was mentioned the existence of a "Policy Reminder - Best Practices", I think I need to do some research on this issue.
Lassala reminded us to take care with public variables and also the garbage collection, as this could ruin our OOP concepts!
We went for lunch. That's good to give some peace to our brains.
Session 4 - Migrating from clipper to Visual FoxPro
by Marcos Martins
We started the presentation by Marcos Martins about migrating an application from Clipper to Visual FoxPro.
This topic seems to be a little misplaced after the beautiful session on OOP. But, aside from the fact that Marcos has a very good expertise about migration, we need to remember that there's several applications running on Clipper and other languages non-windows (has anyone paid attention to the computer at the lobby of the hotel?).
Marcos started with this question: would VFP be the best way for all of the customers? For example, maybe the customer just need a simple executable that fits inside a floppy-disk, and the VFP's runtime would be a problem for this case.
One of the main points highlighted was the need to understand the difference between "Migration" and "Development". The migration comes from the customer that already has an application running on Clipper, a nice application, that works and fills the needs. Then, the migration is the action to switch from the Clipper app to a VFP app, without implementing new features, just with the technology changes. So, the process of migrating is not to develop a new application. It's a conversion process.
Marcos provided an interesting tip: the use of the Microsoft Terminal Server (or even Citrix Metaframe) on the development environment.
An extremely important factor is the analysis of the customer's database, looking for a structure validation and data consistency.
Another point is the decision in making modular migration of the application or just do a "Stop & Go" (by doing all the migration at once). The biggest problem on the case of a "Stop & Go" is the customer's anxiety looking for something new. Here, Marcos highlighted the option to make available small temporary applications to fill the need or anxiety of the customer.
Session 5 - Developing N-Tier applications with Visual FoxPro
by Fábio Vazquez and Claudio Lassala
Now we'll attend the N-Tier session, again with the partners Fábio e Lassala! As the people would say: "These guys Rocks!".
In order to use N-Tier, we need to use OOP, planning, components, experience and a good analysis.
It is very interesting to see more than one way of using VFP to build applications, from using our well-known xbase, to the more advanced technologies, remembering that all the developers, even those who work alone, must make the planning for everything just like they would do for a whole team.
It was highlighted several things about components:
It was mentioned the fact of optimization, security, reduction of the licenses quantity when we are using the data access layer as the only way to manipulate data. This fact generated some discussions among the attendees about VFP gaining scalability, power, performance and security enough to do not need a RDBMS (MS SQL Server), but the speakers highlighted that along with a scenario consideration (each case is a different case), a database server has features that we didn't have in VFP (Backup on-line, security by users, etc). And still about security it was mentioned the fact that every security is planned wondering that no one will ever have physical access to the server.
The N-Tier development makes us loose some RAD features, but brings us several benefits.
And Fábio Vazquez remembered what the OOP session has showed: we need much more of a project than anything else! And N-Tier is much more project and architecture than presentation.
It was shown also the Strong Typing feature, introduced in VFP 7, that grants more clarity when developing components, by specifying the data type for method's parameters and return.
And how the components will talk to each other? XML! The technologies and the concepts fits together. Maybe the OOP has 30 years because it needs another technologies as partners.
And then we learn something we have never think about! What's the class that loads faster? You may be surprised: the Relation class!
There's some tips about components from the middle-tier or data access tier must not have visual interface. Also, there's a concert because a component might be consumed by other languages.
And almost 13 hours after the start of this second day, I didn't get to learn anything and decided to go home. The third day was waiting for me.
Third day (September 22) - by Moacyr Zalcman
The third day in Sao Paulo was marked by 3 sessions dedicated to several alternatives for web development with Visual FoxPro, and a session that served as an orientation for the whole process of certification in general, and the specific certification in Visual FoxPro.
Before the start of session 6, the speaker Claudio Lassala asked how many people in the audience has already developed web application, and we saw that just a few people are actually doing that. We don't have stats related to that, but my job as a consultant and with some chats here and there let me say that the Visual FoxPro developer in Brazil is an independent professional, or an employee for a small company. Customer of this size don't put good amount of money in technology, and that explains why there's still a lot of applications running in FoxPro 2.5/2.6 and still does makes sense that, ten years after Clipper has been discontinued, there's a session about "migrating apps from Clipper to Visual FoxPro", as the one presented by Marcos Martins on the second day.
On this scenario this "late" for fox professional to enter the world of web isn't that strange, but it's just a matter of time. This explains also why N-Tier solutions are just a little spread among us. Despite the fact that it's a methodology applied to any solution, be desktop or Web, it's on the web that it's totally needed. Well, sessions like the ones we've had was extremely important.
Let's go to the sessions:
Session 6 - Developing Web-Apps with Voodoo and ASP
by Claudio Lassala
Lassala showed the Voodoo (from Eps-software), that's a set of classes in Fox, which brings to our world in Fox the concepts that just exists today in ASP.NET. The main concept of this tool is bring to the web development the code reuse, one of the basic pillars of the OOP, even when working with ASP, or alternatively, with FoxWeb, Web Connection or AFP. In a brief analysis, it let us develop for web in a very similar way as we develop for windows.
The main idea is to work with Page Objects producing an abstraction layer for other applications.
In ASP a page built by the use of this tool would be like this:
<% Set oPage=Server.CreateObject("VoodooDemo.AspPage") oPage.addobject "txtTest","WebTextControl" oPage.addobject "cmdTeste","MyButton" oPage.DoEvents() Response.Write opage.Render() %>
This code snippet is very familiar for Fox developers who works with classes, because it just put a textbox in an ASP page, while this textbox is a subclass from a WebTextControl that's a class from Voodoo, and also insert a button that came from another class from Voodoo.
This way, Voodoo brings to a web page objects with support for events, different from HTML controls, and let us create reusable controls, according to the concepts of OOP, and also include data binding.
The code of the events is executed by the server and the page is rendered in HTML or DHTML, according to the browser that made the call, giving transparency to the developer for a browser independent solution. It lets also to build, in a simple fashion, a fancy interface like a data entry form with save, delete and navigation command buttons, that's so familiar for VFP developers, and so difficult to develop with traditional ASP for those who are not familiar with VBScript or JavaScript. It brings also an easy way to keep between page calls.
Another thing that caught my attention was the fact that this tool provide an easy way to bind controls to XML data (through XPath), that's we don't have even in Visual FoxPro.
The presentation really surprised everybody, and has motivated some comments about the author of this tool (Markus Egger) like: "This guy is really from planet Earth?", mainly after discover that this product is a PRG with just 5000 lines of code.
But, not everything is perfect, and what is missing in this tool is a visual interface with drag-and-drop for building the pages, or at least some wizards or builders to make this job even easier.
Session 7- Microsoft Certification in Visual FoxPro - by Fábio Vazquez
Vazquez started asking whether there was on the audience any certificated professional, but actually there was not. Then, he asked to know about the interest in get a certification, and more than 60% of the people showed interest, and most of them was interested in the Visual FoxPro certification.
The certification, according to Vazquez, is the formal acknowledgment from a vendor to a professional, about his competency related to a given tool or technology. To whom hire him, that's something that may assure a mininum of quality.
A lot of vendor of hardware and software give certification for the professionals that uses their products or technologies, for instance, Cisco, Novell, IBM and, of course, Microsoft.
Microsoft has several certifications (MCP,MCSA,MCSD,MCSE,MCAD,MCDBA,MCT), and it's the MCP the simpler and easier to get, because it just requires a single exam. He highlighted that you're a MCP, and not a MCP in Visual FoxPro, because the certification looks for shown a profile of the professional, and not the skill with a given tool.
The certification brings opportunities of expansion in your carreer, makes the professional more competitive, and it's interesting for the group of people where the professional works, because it elevates its value. The exams are respected because they are fair, righteous, and requires pratical expertise, besides the technical and theorical knowlege. However, it has appeared nowadays some trickeries for the exams, what could diminish its respect, and that's not good neither for the professional nor for the vendors.
The Microsoft's certification is accepted worldwide and requires a constant enhancement of your knowledge, because the exams are replaced by new ones, obliging the professional to do a new certification. The minimimun time for expiration of a exam is 2 years, and if the exam was replaced, the professional has 1 year to pass through the new one.
Vazquez highlighted that the preparation brings knowledge, because the exam gathers things that's usually more than what wo do on a daily-basis, and that let the professional more self-confident about his skills. From Microsoft's point-of-view, the certification in Visual Foxpro, together with the product's sales, is a thermometer of the use of the product, and that increases its visibility, and consequently, increasing its support. It also shows how serious the professional take the product.
Some important tips was given, like: together with the technical knowledge, we need to be smart to answer some questions. In front of 2 alternatives that seems to be correct, we need to choose the one that's closer to the "best practices", even if you don't use them or even don't agree with them, and also, the one that best fits to the Microsoft's strategy currently. It's also very important a good pratical experience, and that's why is important to participate activelly of user groups, pay attention to related problems and search for solutions for these real problems.
Visual FoxPro give us certification through two exams: 70-156 Designing and Implementing Desktop Applications with Microsoft Visual FoxPro 6 70-155 Designing and Implementing Distributed Applications with Microsoft Visual FoxPro 6. This exams doesn't have simulated tests.
It were mentioned the topics covered by the exam 70-156 and also it were comented about the day of the exam, that you need to schedule the day and hour, and that you need to take care with the time, arriving always in advance. It's not permitted to take anything with you to the place where the exam is taken (a doubt that was raised was about bringing a dictionary - the exams are handled just in English, and that seems to depend upon the company that provide the exams), and the notes made during the exam must be leave there.
Microsoft wants that you take the exams, therefore they offer some benefit (dicounts in some products, and also some products for free), aside from the web-site accessible just by certified professionals. And you can also use a logo in your business card and web site.
Session 8 - Web applications with VFP,ASP.NET and XML Web Services - by Claudio Lassala
The first phrase of this session was: "Visual FoxPro and ASP.NET - This is productivity", and that shows that the intention was to show how we can integrate Visual FoxPro to the .NET world, trying to use what's best in both tools, from a FoxPro developer's perspective.
Just like always happens on this occasions, Lassala tells that when the Fox was removed from the .NET, very far from representing a lack of commitment from Microsoft with the product, it showed that they tried to keep its integrity as a development tool, and they didn't changed the produt into a simple programming language. The integration with the .NET platform came from the use of COM components, and that's not a technological problem, as this technology is in use by several server from Microsofot (like Windows 2000, Sql Server, Biztalk).
Of course this is a polemic issue, and there's no definitive talk about this. I agree with the above afirmations, but my particular point-of-vies says that doesn't makes sense to keep evolving two distinct technologies (COM and .NET), since the second one is something that is an enhancement over the first one. Of course, Microsoft is a smart company and they're considering all the investment done in COM (as was told, even Microsoft relies a lot on it). There'll be a transition, determined by the velocity that the market accepts the new platform. We can't consider, under this point-of-view, that we must invest large amounts of money in COM looking to the future, but this investments at the present moment, looking for productivity, makes all the sense, and it was under this aspect that I saw this session.
VFP interacts with VS.NET through the XML Web Services and COM component. Considering COM, the .NET platform doesn't recognizes it natively because they have different binary patters, therefore it's necessary to export the Type Libray into .NET's manifest. This is done through a "proxy assembly", called "Runtime Callable Wrapper". The assembly, exposes its funcionality to .NET and can be used like any other native assembly.
It was done a demonstration of an ASP.NET with a page containing .NET components accessing data through VFP classes, encapsulated as COM components, exported to .NET.
All of the investments done in the business components and data access is are preserved and we gain productivity on the built of pages given by .NET, with a minimal learing of C# (or VB.NET). During this presentation, when it was analysed the code in C#, the comparisions between what we have in Visual Foxpro and C# was highlighted (equivalency between dataset and namespaces of C# and DBC and VCX from Fox, respectively), as well as some stuff present in C# that doesn't exists in Fox (declaration and initialization of variables in a single line, and structured exception handling with try/catch).
The next topic was about Web Services with Fox. As the first tool from Microsoft that has ability to build and consume Web Services, having native functions to work with XML, and with its well-known capabilities of working and manipulating strings, it is a natural choose to work with Web services.
Web Services are an logic unit of an application that provides data and services for other applications. It uses a structure based on HTTP, SOAP and XML and exposes its funcionality throught a WSDL file written in XML, and the web service is the main answer from Microsoft for the evolution of distributed applications including cross-platform.
Session 9 - Developing Web apps with FoxWeb by Nilton Paulino
Sessions 6 and 8 showed solutions for Web development with Fox, that was trying to make the using and knowledge of HTML on the pages transparent for the developer, using OOP and using the knowlege existent in Fox through the using of COM components created with VFP. Paulino, on the other hand, has tried to show another way, maybe louly, but just as powerful if take productivity into consideration for Web applications.
The building of the pages was done with DreamWeaver, but it could have been done with FrontPage or any other HTML editor. The FoxWeb is a scripting language, based on ISAPI, that's a lot simillar to ASP, but instead using Fox commands.
The content between <% %> is just Fox, interpreted and executed by an instance of Visual FoxPro. This way, the Fox or Clipper programmer can benefits from his current knowledge, even without knowing OOP and COM, in order to build web applications. Paulino hightlighted that the FoxWeb's Response object is richer than the one from ASP. He showed how we can start from some simple conventions and build very fast some forms using some classes for data insertion and search, displaying it in a very fancy layout.
Finishing
After all the sessions has ended, we went for the raffle for prizes, offered by some companies that has supported the event: Microsoft, EPS-Software, RapoZine, Universal Thread and LM-Informática. And after that, we started a small photos session.
The final sensation was that everybody on the Fox community can feel the pleasure of having professionals who are able to produce such a wonderful event with an awesome technical content, with an organization if not perfect absolutely competent. It also deserves to mention that, as told me by Paulino, the attendees has helped the speakers with all the interest showed during all the days. And more than anything else, it showed the marriage between the need of content in Portuguese always felt byt the community, with the capability of producing and make real such an event like this. I hope that this serves as an example!
See comments from the attendees, evaluation and several photos at http://www.rapozine.com.br/EventoSP.asp
