Southwest Fox 2006, Part 2

I started Saturday morning with Bo Durban's Using GDI+ with VFP session, which focused on the amazing VFPX GDI+ project he and Craig Boyd have been working on. He showed how easy it is to use GDI+ to do any type of drawing on any type of Windows canvas (window, report, printer, etc.), including rectangles, ellipses, pie slices, polygons, and paths of any shape. Very cool session!

Next I presented my Adding IntelliSense to Your Application session. As I blogged about when I presented this in Prague, it's kind of an esoteric topic, since not everyone needs to provide IntelliSense to their users. However, I was pleasantly surprised at how much feedback I got on this session, and how much interest there was in my Favorites for IntelliSense class, which gives you control over how IntelliSense works and what it displays for a particular class.

I missed the next session as I caught up on email and chatted with other developers. However, I'm sorry I missed Mike Feltman's Where Do You Want To Go Today session, which I had originally planned to see; from the comments of those who attended, it was a great session.

After lunch (make your own sandwiches from a buffet), I attended Nancy Folsom's session From Procedure Toward Component. This was a refactoring session similar to the one she did at GLGDW. I really liked the way she presented it, showing one step of a refactoring at a time and going over the code changes at each step. This approach made a somewhat abstract topic very concrete.

The last session of the day was Toni Feltman presenting Using Version Control with VFP. She started the session with a clarification: yes, she is pregnant, not just getting bigger. She then proceeded to show the basics of Visual SourceSafe 6.0, an outdated version she chose on purpose because it's one that many VFP developers already have (it came with Visual Studio 6, as did VFP 6). She showed how it integrates with VFP and discussed the pros and cons of integration. Finally, she showed Visual SourceSafe 2005 and discussed the features of several other popular source control packages.

After a break, we had a speaker and vendor dinner at the conference center. Craig Berntson and Cathy Pountney showed us all up by dressing up (they looked like they were going to a prom). Cathy admitted she'd never seen Monty Python, so Craig tried to convince her by acting out several skits, but was unsuccessful (not surprising if you were there to watch!).