Ken Levy, Visual FoxPro Product Manager at Microsoft, released some news on his Friday night keynote. Some nice announcements about the product and the community were made. He started with a video of Steve Ballmer speaking about VFP 7, SOAP, XML and "Microsoft is committing to improve Visual FoxPro and continue to serve the needs of FoxPro developers worldwide". He spoke a lot about Visual FoxPro and .NET. He also confirmed that Visual FoxPro SP1 is and will be the only service pack available for the current version. There are no plans for SP2. The next release is likely to be within the next version of Visual FoxPro. He then talked a little bit about communities and mostly about the updates on Microsoft sites to reflect the presence of Visual FoxPro within those pages as well as some enhancements within the Visual FoxPro pages themselves. In addition to that, he talked about the Universal Thread and visited a few other sites. Some demos have followed in regards to some Visual FoxPro integration to .NET. Then, the announcement of the Visual FoxPro Toolkit for .NET was made. This is a collection of VFP functions that have been reproduced for use in VB .NET, C# and all .NET languages. This makes it easier for VFP developers to work in .NET when applications require it. Kamal Patel, who developed the VFP Toolkit for .NET, explained that he believes VB .NET is easier for VFP developers to work with than C#, because the languages are similar.
Despite the fact that a lot of material was presented during the keynote, the audience appreciated the demos, the announcements and new features for the next version of VFP code-named Toledo. The Keynote Address was tape recorded and the transcript will be posted on the Universal Thread soon.
The next two days included a lot of sessions on a variety of topics. Among some of them, an interesting session on using Adobe Acrobat with Visual FoxPro. This has been a popular subject on the Universal Thread in recent years. It was nice to have a session dedicated on this topic. That session was Standing Room Only. Some of the attendees were watching the session from the entrance. Rick demoed some manipulation of Acrobat to build some nice reports. He also had Acrobat within a VFP form. That's quite nice!
Cathy Pountney had a session on Report Writer Tips and Tricks. She has great experience with reports and the session was greatly welcome. Her book on Visual FoxPro Report Writer was released last week. She tells you how to use every nook and cranny of the report writer, and even shows you how to do things you thought were up to now impossible. If you’re serious about quality output from your VFP applications, you can’t do without this book!
As usual, Rick Strahl presented some Internet technologies with Visual FoxPro. This time, he had a session on using business objects to exchange information between a Web Service and a VFP application. Flexability requires a certain degree of design. A WebService produces XML. A VFP app works with cursors. There has to be at least one object layer between these. That object would have to "know" how to convert XML to VFP and back. A more flexible design would use two objects, one to wrap the WebService Server side functions and the other to handle the VFP client side functions and the SOAP proxy.
The vendors track was still present at this event. Major vendors from the Visual FoxPro community were present to give some sessions on their products. In one of them, Drew Speedie demonstrated many of the major features of Visual MaxFrame. Drew proceeded to build a working data entry form, with a grid for navigating through the table's records and used a view for updating the table on a second page. He explained every step so it took longer than I've ever seen him take. He gave some of the VMP developers a chance to show off some of their work.
As usual, in the closing session Russ included a raffle for a large number of products totalling over $1,000 donated by the vendors. That was followed by Whil Hentzen renowned "Hostile User Interfaces" session, which of course, contained a lot of funny moments. Alan Cooper proceeded with related topics on coaching companies about product planning. He presented sobering thoughts on the increasing impact of technology on business. Product planning bridges the gap between marketing and engineering.
Russ Swall mentioned that he plans to host the event again next year. The date will be announced. Congratulations!
You can obtain the full coverage of the event at http://www.universalthread.com/Conferences/EssentialFox/2002. A big "thank you" to our reporter Mike Yearwood who did an excellent job.