>>>>The thing I remember most vividly about the roll out of VFP 3 was the "paradigm shift" where the first thing you heard about at Virginia Beach and Foxteach and Whilfest was about OO - examples ( from Booth, Menachim, Hozier, Speedie et al ) being very OO but not at all relevant to normalized data. ( Customer objects, invoice objects etc ) with no real explanation of the ORM that would have made it all relevant to the normalized data tables we were used to working with.
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>>>>And then there was the talk of subclassing - and frameworks. The first thing you were supposed to do was build a set of class libraries, frameworks etc. And this got a lot of people who had heard of OO about an hour before that thinking they were capable of doing just that. And hey,they had Tastrade to show them how.
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>>>>( oh yeah, and I remember getting smacked down by Speedie on CIS when he announced he was doing a "Tour to introduce VFP 3.0 Beta" at which everyone would get a Master set of the Beta and I expressed enthusiasm for the Speedie Master Beta Tour - FHIHCTAJ )
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>>>I remember those days well. I can recall having very long discussions with the likes of Speedie, Black, Griver, the Feltmans, and Menachim about how to divide up the furtile ground of OO into reasonable chuncks that could be digested by the masses fairly easily without putting everyone in the room into information overload. I especially recall handling some questions from attendees that were really very good questions but whose acurrate answers would take volumes to present. How we made it through that time period I will never quite understand.
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>>>Still, today, I see the questions from some of the newbies that reak of, "Oh if I only had the time to tell you the whole story behind that your mind would explode."
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>>A genuine compliment is always a pleasure to give, so here's one for you. You don't post on here very often and I am sure some people here don't know who you are. For their benefit, JimB was a stalwart of the FoxForum on Compuserve and an MVP when there were damned few of them. I know I expressed my appreciation some times back then, when I was getting up to speed as fast as I could, but it probably wasn't enough. You truly helped me learn FoxPro. You had a professionalism and attention to detail I really liked, with a wry sense of humor for free. To me you will always be the uber-MVP. Spelling and all <g>.
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>>PS -- I am working with medical software now as well, and in fact have inherited responsibility for EFT transactions with our clearinghouses -- including WebMD.
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>I'll second that. I always think if Jim as the gold standard for teaching, mentoring, presenting and generally being patient ( as well as being fun to hang out with )
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>In a profession where ego sometimes gets in the way of communication, Jim always seems to use humor and clarity to get ideas across and genuinely seems more interested in helping the listener understand the concept than in impressing an audience with his own brilliance.

I still remember his dancing red ball app he demoed at one of the conferences (95 or 96?)... :o)