Today is the last day of OzFox in Sydney, Australia. What a wonderful conference and a great city to have it in!

My hearty congratulations to Craig Bailey who organized this conference. OzFox was so well organized, you'd think Craig did this for a living when, in fact, this was the first conference he's organized. He and other staff from the company he works for, Talman Pty, (particularly Peter Metcalf) pampered the speakers, spending Saturday to show us their beautiful, friendly city.

There were about 60 - 65 attendees, which is an increase over last year (and once word gets out how great this conference was, I'm sure attendance will grow significantly next year). All of the sessions (except vendor sessions) were in one room, so there was no having to decide which sessions to attend or missing sessions you really wanted to see. The topics were well-chosen (a mixture of VFP 9 specific sessions, .NET with VFP sessions, and practical "how to" sessions) and the speakers did a great job of educating and entertaining the attendees. In his last session, Mike Helland wore the jersey of a local rugby team and even painted his face (at the start of his session) with the team's colors.

Microsoft was represented by Andrew Coates, a former VFP consultant who's still enthusiastic about our favorite tool. He did a great bonus session on integrating VFP and MapPoint Web Services, and even convinced Microsoft to provide three XBox machines and large screen plasma displays for the "XBox" room at the conference (a very popular hang-out after sessions, and even during some!).

This was truly the most scenic location for a conference I have ever attended. Sydney is beautiful and the conference location (Coogee Beach, pronounced "Could-gee") was at the Crowne Plaza right on the beach (I could hear the gentle sound of ocean waves in my room at night).

Thanks to Craig and the staff at Talman for putting on one of the most enjoyable conferences I've attended in my 14 years of conference-going. If you get a chance to attend next year's conference, I can't recommend OzFox highly enough!

Doug