Southwest Fox 2007 Coverage

This years SW Fox conferences was one of the best ones yet with over twice the number of attendees as last years SW Fox. Tamar, Doug, and Rick did a nearly flawless job in organizing this event to the benefit of everyone in the Fox community, THANKS GUYS. The mix of stimulating conversations, great content and a very positive atmosphere created an excitement about the conference and the future of VFP.

The venue at the Arizona Golf Resort was great and the staff was the friendliest and most helpful I have ever encountered. The rooms of the hotel surround a golf course with a separate conference center area. The sessions were held in four connected rooms that was opend up for the keynote and closing sessions. This made it easy to find and get to your sessions as well as creating a natural area for people to congregate. The rooms (couple I saw) were spacious, clean, and reasonably priced. About half the rooms were within a couple hundred yards of the main areas, but some had rooms quite a distance away (Hotel staff would take you down on a golf cart if requested). The restaurant was upscale but not posh and the bar was in a separate (but joined) section.

The content was awesome, starting right off the bat with the preconference. Micheal Hogan demonstrated some relatively simple but effective ways to publish fox content on the web. He demonstrated using string manipulation to alter content designed in a web designer application (like DreamWeaver) to infuse VFP data within sophisticated web pages both in a static mode and dynamically. The keynote had several very interesting demo's. Christoff demonstrated the Guineu project which is a replacement set of runtime DLL's that allow compiled fox code to run on any platform that supports .Net or Mono including Linux, the web and PDA's. Toni Feltman demonstrated the eTechnoligica's VFP extensions and compiler. Although able to do many similar things, this compiler works with VFP source code to produce .Net IL code, and enhances some functionality within VFP (such as breaking the 2 gig barrier) Both of these projects are well on their way considering their short life, but are very much beta. Also at the keynote, Tamar was surprised to receive the VFP Lifetime Achievement Award being deceived by Rick & Doug right up to the moment it was announced. Congrats Tamar

There were dozens of sessions in four tracks from some of the top experts in Foxpro. Many of the regular faces were to be seen among the speakers, but also several speakers I have not seen before who did very well. There were a couple of themes among the sessions including web development, interop with other languages, and a business track. I particularly enjoyed Alan Stevens (JFast) presentation on using Winforms from within VFP using a free MS supported tool. Rick Strahl (WestWind) had a great session on using VFP and AJAX to drive dynamic data content. Marci Akins session titled 'The 26 Hour Day' provided many easy to implement productivity enhancers to make the most out of your development time. Many, Many other great sessions with tons of content which is given in its entirety (then some) on the conference CD.

Lot's of SWAG, T-shirts, conference binder and CD, vendor supplied software including a free license for Visual Fox Express for Mike & Toni Feltman (Thanks Guys). There was also thousands of dollars worth of books and software given away in raffle format. No bag this year, but I've got a closet full of them anyhow...

And, of course, the most important aspect of this conference is it was great for networking. I got to see some old friends again, as well as make some new ones. The speakers were very generous with their time after hours and many great conversations were had and connections made. I would especially like to thank Marcia Akins and Andy Kramek for their hospitality, a good time was had by all.

So, if you haven't gotten out to a conference in a while, this one is highly recommended, see you next year.


Bob