Stonefield in the News

Stonefield was featured in the Business section of Saturday's local paper. They got a few things wrong:

• My title is actually Chief Technology Officer, not Chief Information Officer.
• I wish our sales were $5 million per year!
• We don't sell 220,000 units per year; we have 177,000 users in total.

Still, it's nice to get some PR.

Southwest Fox Super-Saver Deadline Approaching

June 30 is the deadline to save $125 and get a free half-day pre-conference session for Southwest Fox 2009. Registrations are already at last year’s numbers, so be sure to join us in sunny Arizona in October to hear the brightest VFP developers on the planet speak about our favorite development environment. See you there!

Register now

Speakers

Sessions

Racing Again

This past Saturday, the Regina YMCA once again held the event I look forward to all year: Echo Challenge. Our team, Thunder, competed in 2007 and 2008, and with three original members and three new ones, we were up to the challenge.

For the second year in a row, my Wednesday evening ride before Echo Challenge was marred by a bike crash. This time, it was on the cool-down part of my ride around beautiful Wascana Lake. As I came around a corner, a woman on another bike going the opposite direction was in my lane, coming right for me (she wanted to turn left but didn’t check for traffic first). We both tried to veer out of the way, but ended up side-swiping each other and down we went. My left wrist hit her bike, smashing my watch, spraining my wrist, and leaving a watch-shaped bruise. We both made sure the other was OK, and I continued on my way home. A couple of hours later, my right knee tightened up. By morning, I could barely walk because I could neither bend nor straighten my leg. Stretching and ice helped, but I figured Echo was no go this year, which really bummed me out. Fortunately, with lots of stretching, the knee loosened up a fair bit over the next couple of days, so I was able to ride after all.

Saturday started out cool and a little rainy, but by mid-morning, it was beautiful: about 24C (75F), cloudy, and some wind. I had a chance to meet our new team members, including our swimmer who’s only 12 (but a member of a local swim team).

The swim event was first: 750 m in the cold lake waters. That has to be the toughest leg, but Jamie did great, finishing in 13:34, good enough for 11th of 18 teams and almost nine minutes faster than last year’s swimmer. He tagged Lisa, our hill runner, who finished in 5:15 (placing her 10th) despite struggling with a sudden flare-up of asthma.

Here’s a photo of Nick and I waiting for the cycling leg to start. You can see the lake and the hills where the cycling route goes in the background.

Lisa tagged me and off I went. Although my knee was a little stiff, I managed a speed of about 45 kph (28 mph) for the 1.5 km to the start of the hills. I passed seven other cyclists, all in their twenties, and went down the final hill at over 50 kph (31 mph). However, I was significantly slower than last year: this year’s cycling leg was longer, but my time over the hill part of the race was 21:11 vs. 16:29 last year. Part of it was the knee, part was a head-wind we didn’t have last year, but the major part was I wasn’t in as good shape as I was last year. Here’s a shot of me at a relatively flat part of the hill section:

I ended up finishing 8th, which was pretty disappointing. However, there were a lot of new faces in the race this year, many of whom are serious athletes, and I was the second oldest cyclist, so I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad.

Here’s a shot of Nick and I at the end of the race:

I tagged Bob, who finished the 7 km run in 34:30, 1:30 faster than last year, 16th of the 18. Finally, Mike and Adrian finished with the 1.6 km canoe event. Their time of 32:33 was two minutes faster than last year, putting them in 17th.

Overall, we finished 17th out of 18 teams, not as good as last year, but it’s for a good cause. Unfortunately, donations were down this year, but hopefully we can get more teams out next year and get donations back up again.

Congratulations to the YMCA staff and volunteers for putting on a well-organized and fun event once again. I’m already dreaming of next year’s event!

Free SnagIt 7 Today Only

As posted on Digital Inspiration (a blog I highly recommend), until 5 P.M. Eastern today (June 5, 2009) only, you can get a free copy of SnagIt 7 (which is a couple of versions old) from TechSmith. This is a cool offer if you don’t already own SnagIt, a tool I find indispensible for creating screen shots for documentation and other purposes.

Stonefield Query 3.3 Video

We posted a 25-minute video showing some of the new features in Stonefield Query version 3.3.

Stonefield Query SDK Version 3.3 Released

We released version 3.3 of the Stonefield Query SDK today. Other versions, such as for Sage Accpac ERP, Sage Pro, ACT!, and so on will be released over the next few weeks; watch our blog for release information.

The list of new and enhanced features in version 3.3 is extensive; see the online versions of the end-user help and SDK help for complete details. Here are the major new features.

Report Designer

• The new Formula Editor allows you to create your own formulas without using the Advanced Report Designer or customizing the data dictionary.
• The new Show percentage of total option in the Format page of the Field Properties dialog automatically adds a new column to the report showing the percentage that the field is of the subtotal in detail lines, of the next level of grouping in subgroup footers, and of the grand total for group footers.
• Turn on the new Show totals in group headers option in Step 5 of the Quick Report Wizard and the Options page of the Reports Explorer to display group totals in the group header rather than the group footer.
• Stonefield Query now supports Crystal Reports reports. You can add them to Stonefield Query using the External Report Wizard.
• The Preview window is no longer modal, meaning you can open multiple instances. Also, the new Preview reports in tabbed pages setting in the Options dialog allows you to determine whether different preview windows are used when you run more than one report or whether the reports appear as different tabs in the same preview window.
• There are several new output options available. You can specify that a timestamp is added to the file created to prevent overwriting existing files, that the file emailed to someone shouldn't be deleted after the email is sent, and what filename to use for the emailed file.
• Previous versions of Stonefield Query create a report as a PDF file when emailing the report to someone. You can now specify the type of file used as an attachment.
• You can now specify that each group in a report should be output to a separate file or email and that the email address should come from a field in the report itself. This can be used, for example, to email invoices to customers; the report is grouped by customer name and includes the customer's email address, so each customer's records are emailed to them.
• You can now sort fields in database order or alphabetical order in Step 2 of the report wizards.
• You can now tell Stonefield Query to display in the Tables drop-down list only those tables related to tables already appearing in the selected list.
• Reports are now stored as export files with an SFX extension in a folder structure that exactly matches the folders in the Reports Explorer.
• The new Send summary queries to database engine setting in the Options dialog allows you to specify whether Stonefield Query or the database engine does data summarization. This may significantly improve the performance of certain types of reports.
• The new Run report with no records option in Step 5 of the report wizards and the Options page in the Reports Explorer allows you to run a report when there are no records that match your conditions.

SDK

• The data dictionary now supports versioning. This is useful if tables and fields were added to or removed from the database between versions and you have some users using an older version and some using a newer version but they're all using the latest version of your customized Stonefield Query. To prevent users from selecting tables and fields that may not exist in their version of the database, you can specify the version number for each table and field that doesn't exist in all versions.
• Stonefield Query now supports scripting in VB.Net and C#.
• Like us, you may have a blog or news feed describing changes to your application. However, most users don't read blogs. So, Stonefield Query now includes a built-in news reader. If you fill in the URL for News Feeds configuration setting with the URL for an RSS feed, the news reader is available to your users.
• The Create Help Files function in the Configuration Utility now runs Stonefield Query and automates the generation of all customized screen shots, so there's no need to do that manually any more. That can save you a considerable amount of time.
• You can now refresh a single database rather than all databases if you wish by selecting the Refresh Database function from the Objects or shortcut menus.
• The new Number of Days for Demo Version configuration setting allows you to create a shorter demo period than the default 30 days if you wish.
• The code window opened when you right-click the code for a script and choose Zoom now supports find capability. Right-click in the code window and choose Find from the shortcut menu. Also, when you choose Build Expression from the shortcut menu, the Stonefield Query Expression Builder is now used.
• A new Test button in the database properties page of the Configuration Utility allows you to test that the connection settings are correct.

Southwest Fox Sessions and Speakers Announced

We announced the speaker and session lineup for Southwest Fox 2009 today. This year was the hardest yet selecting from the list of proposals because we had a record number of submissions. Once again, there are great topics such as using Visual Earth in VFP applications, implementing MySQL, getting the most out of FoxCharts, and adding full-text search to your applications.

Registration is now open, so be sure to sign up today for a fun three days in Phoenix in October. Take advantage of the “Southwest Fox Stimulus Plan”: if you register before July 1, you save $125 and get a free half-day pre-conference session, a $99 value. With sessions on Web development, source control, and refactoring legacy code, the hard part will be picking which one to attend.

We also offer an early-bird special: register before September 1 and save $50.

We're looking forward to seeing you in October!

Stonefield Software Inks Australian Distribution Deal with Sage

Stonefield Software has signed a distribution deal with Sage Business Solutions to expand the distribution of our popular database reporting software, Stonefield Query, to the Australian, NZ and Pacific Island Market. The new agreement builds on our dramatic growth as the premier end-user focused database reporting software solution in the U.S. and Canada, and expands into the Australian and New Zealand region with a prospective market share of tens of thousands of Sage Software users.

For details, see our press release page or press release itself.