Off to DevCon

Saturday morning, I'm heading for DevCon in Anaheim, California. Coincidentally, Rick Schummer and I are on the same flight from Minneapolis to Orange County, which may be bad news for him, given my luck with flights leaving on time.

This will be my 17th DevCon as an attendee (I only missed the first one in Toledo in 1989) and my 11th as a speaker (1997 was the first). I'm the only person who will have attended 17 consecutive DevCons, although this will also be number 17 for Alan Griver (just not consecutive; he was at the first one but missed one in the middle).

However, my string of consecutive DevCons as an exhibitor (1993 was the first) is broken: For the first time in fifteen years, I won't have a booth there. Unfortunately, it just wasn't cost effective anymore, plus our booth (and staff) are going to be at the 2007 Timberline User Group National Conference in Dallas at roughly the same time, showing our new Stonefield Query for Timberline.

For posterity, here are the ones I've attended:

1990 Toledo
1991 Toledo
1992 Phoenix
1993 Orlando
1995 San Diego
1996 Scottsdale
1997 San Diego
1998 Orlando
1999 Palm Springs
2000 Miami
2001 San Diego
2002 Ft. Lauderdale
2003 Palm Springs
2004 Las Vegas
2005 Las Vegas
2006 Phoenix
2007 Anaheim

I'm presenting four sessions at DevCon:

• Best Practices for Vertical Application Development: this is an updated version of the session I presented at Great Lakes Great Database Workshop in 2006 and earlier this year at OzFox. I'll also be presenting this session at Southwest Fox 2007.


• Integrating RSS and VFP: this is an updated version of the session I gave last year at DevCon. It now includes material on accessing the common RSS store installed with Vista and IE 7.


• Deploying VFP Applications with InnoSetup: this is an updated version of the session I gave at last year's Southwest Fox and earlier this year at OzFox. It has a new section on deploying on Vista.


• Developing VFP Applications for Windows Vista: this is a new session and the one I'm most excited about. Vista presents some cool opportunities but also some challenges to all developers, regardless of the language they use. I think it'll be an eye-opener for those who haven't deployed an application on Vista yet or are struggling with the issues right now. I'm also presenting this session at Southwest Fox 2007.