Alex,

>I'd be very interested in hearing what non-vfp conferences others find interesting and/or attend regularly that help them improve on their skills.

In addition to VFP conferences, CoDe Magazine has booths at TechEd (last week), Visual Studio Connections (run simultaneously with several others) in early October, and Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in late October. The Connections conference will include sessions on the Office System, in addition to .NET and SQL Server. PDC will focus on upcoming new MS technologies, like SQL Server Yukon, Visual Studio Whidbey release, and Longhorn (next OS).

For general programming practices, you might look into Software Development East and West - I've never attended them, but they sound like they MIGHT be along the lines of what you want. You'd have to investigate more closely, because I might be wrong. <s>