The next meeting of the Philadelphia VFP User Group offers a special treat as VFP guru Christof Wollenhaupt visits. The special date for this meeting is MONDAY, October 11 at 7 PM at Valley Forge Pension Management, 550 Township Line Road, Suite 300, Blue Bell, PA 19422. As usual, we'll start with dinner at 6:30 PM. We'll provide dinner for this meeting, so please let Bob Pierce (rpierce@smooth-on.com) know if you plan to join us, so we have enough food.

Christof will preview his Southwest Fox session "How the Fox is Different":

You always knew that FoxPro is different from every other programming language! You had a pretty clear idea that the development environment of Visual FoxPro is far superior to the one found in .NET, Java, and PHP. How else is it possible that those languages exists for years or even more than a decade and still lack features that FoxPro sported for eons? Even the simplest task in any of these languages requires an incredible amount of time. It's certainly not surprising that every single .NET project takes a multitude of time of a comparable VFP project to complete.

Ever thought along these lines? Then this session might have a few surprises for you. There will be a few insights in how FoxPro and other languages (primarily .NET) differ. We will see how even minor differences in the languages lead to vastly different application designs. It shouldn't come as surprise that many techniques published in books are aimed at C++, .NET and Java developers. Those techniques are good for those languages, but often a sub-optimal choice for VFP. Nonetheless, they were adopted by the VFP community and naturally failed to deliver the promised value.

If you have years of experience with Visual FoxPro, this session will support you in using .NET more efficiently. Yet, at the same time, it should made clear that "knowing OOP" is by far not enough to master .NET. Becoming proficient in .NET isn't the matter of learning a language; it's a matter of learning an idiom.

If you are one of the poor souls that started as a .NET or Java developer and have been forced to work on a VFP project, you'll learn that VFP isn't as awful as you first thought; just very different.


Christof Wollenhaupt specializes in FoxPro and .NET development and consulting. Having worked with FoxPro for more than 18 years he now has made every thinkable error in FoxPro personally. Customers around the world rely on his experience to learn from these mistakes. Christof is an international speaker at user group meetings and conferences and the organiser of the Hamburger Stammtisch für Datenbankentwickler, a monthly meeting for Microsoft database developers. Despite spending his time writing way over a hundred articles for various magazines, he was awarded the Microsoft MVP award every year since 1997. Christof authored the Guineu product family, a development environment that moves FoxPro forward to other platforms. For more information please visit http://www.foxpert.com and http://www.guineu.net.

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