Tuesday, April 11, 2017

No Southwest Xbase++ in 2017

Geek Gatherings LLC, the organizers of Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++, have partnered with Alaska Software and the best speakers from the Xbase++ community to run Southwest Xbase++ for the past five years. Last November, Alaska Software informed us their core staff members would not be presenting at conferences in 2017, in order to focus on their other commitments including the LEAP program, which tests Visual FoxPro source code projects in Xbase++.

After hearing the news, we initially thought we would put the Xbase++ conference on hiatus for a single year as Alaska expects to have speakers available again in 2018. But after talking with others in the Xbase++ Community (including Alaska), we decided to try to run the conference without speakers from Alaska. We issued the Call for Speakers for both conferences. Unfortunately, we did not receive enough session proposals to put together an Xbase++ conference this year. We are naturally disappointed, but Alaska will continue to sponsor Southwest Fox and we are sure Southwest Fox will be a terrific conference on its own as it was for eight years before we incorporated the Xbase++ conference. In 2018, we hope to return to our usual dual conference format.

We look forward to announcing the session topics and speakers and to getting registration rolling for 2017 very soon. Thank you for your continued support of Southwest Fox.

Monday, April 03, 2017

VFPX is Moving

Microsoft recently announced they are shutting down CodePlex. Since CodePlex is the home of VFPX, the open source site for add-on projects for Visual FoxPro, VFPX has to move. The VFPX administrators (Rick Schummer, Craig Boyd, Jim Nelson, and I) started planning the move as soon as we saw the announcement. We don't have a lot of details yet, but we'll be moving all VFPX projects to GitHub. One thing that'll change is the structure: each project will have its own repository rather than all projects being in one place, which is the way modern open source projects are managed. Stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks.