Southwest Fox Attendees Get Free Copy of Lianja

Lianja Inc. is offering a FREE COPY of Lianja App Builder Standard Edition, valued at $395, for all attendees of Southwest Fox. Build data-centric Apps on Windows, Mac or Linux using your Visual FoxPro, Python, PHP or JavaScript expertise and then deploy on the Desktop, Web and Mobile.

2012 Ceil Silver Ambassador Announced

Geek Gatherings is pleased to announce that the 2012 Ceil Silver Ambassador is Jun Tangunan. Jun is a well-known member of the Foxite VFP community site and has a great blog at http://sandstorm36.blogspot.com.

The Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund raises money from the VFP community to bring a developer to the Southwest Fox conference as an ambassador for the developers in his or her country. This gives the recipient the opportunity to meet and share experiences with developers attending Southwest Fox and gives other attendees the opportunity to learn about VFP development in the recipient's country.

The Fund is named in memory of Ceil Silver, a long-time member of the Visual FoxPro community, who passed away in January, 2009. Ceil served as Editor of FoxPro Advisor's Tips and Tricks column for many years and was the founder of the Westchester County FoxPro chapter of PADD, the Professional Association of Database Developers. She was also a contributing author to Special Edition Using Visual FoxPro 6. Ceil understood the value of attending professional conferences, and continued to attend them until her failing health prevented it.

Southwest Fox and Xbase++ 2012 News

A couple of announcements about the fall conferences:

First, registration is now open for both Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++. Registrations have been already been pouring in, which is great news.

I blogged about this last year, but I think it bears repeating. Last year was a tough, scary year for us. By mid-August, we were in full panic mode, as we were so far below breakeven that it looked like a five-figure loss for us. Fortunately, a larger-than-usual number of people signed up after September 1; that combined with an increase in sponsorship took us over the top. So, one thing I ask: if you love Southwest Fox like we do, and want to see it continue, do us a favor and register early this year. That would take out the panic for us and allow us to plan for the type of conference we really want to host.

Second, speakers and sessions for Southwest Xbase++ are now available. Remember, if you register for one conference, you’re free to attend sessions in the other conference as well: it’s BOGO (buy one, get one free). There are some sessions specifically intended for VFP developers, including Project PolarFox: State of the Union and Xbase++ 2.0 from a VFP Developer's Perspective. Also, some of the Southwest Fox session will appeal to Xbase++ developers, such as Advanced Topics in Mercurial: Taking it to the Next Level, jQuery 101, and Office Automation Without Office.

I think it’s cool that we’ll have a whole new set of attendees (the Xbase++ folks) at the conferences this year. It’ll give us more chances to talk to fellow developers and share cool ideas.

Tamar, Rick, and I are all looking forward to seeing you in Phoenix this October!

FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award 2012

The FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award honors those individuals who have contributed a great deal to the FoxPro community over the years. See http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~FoxProCommunityLifetimeAchievementAward~VFP for previous award recipients. These recipients wish to continue the award and have created a committee to select a recipient for 2012. The committee consists of all 11 living previous recipients, Alan Griver (yag), and Sergey Berezniker representing the FoxPro community.

To submit your nominations for the 2012 recipients, please post a comment here by June 15, 2012.

Southwest Fox 2012 Speakers and Sessions Announced

Speakers and sessions for Southwest Fox 2012 have been announced. We’re glad to welcome back a couple of speakers who haven’t been to Southwest Fox in a long time: Rod Paddock and Kevin McNeish. And of course Cathy Knight, Kevin Cully, and Rick Strahl, who didn’t speak at the conference last year.

I saw Kevin McNeish’s iPhone/iPad app development track in Germany last year and these sessions are so good, we specifically asked Kevin to do a full-day of training at Southwest Fox this year. If you’re interested in iOS development, register before July 1 so you get half of the day for free!

Some of the sessions I’m personally looking forward to are:

• Rod’s jQuery session. I’ve heard really good things about it from folks who’ve seen it.
• Steve’s HTML5 session (notice I didn’t specify “Bodnar”; after having three Steves last year, we only have one this year). I haven’t had a chance to play with the new things in HTML 5 so this will be a good intro.
• Rick Borup’s Advanced Mercurial session (to make up for the missing Steves, we have three Ricks). Last year, Rick did a killer intro session on Mercurial, so I’m looking forward to moving to the next level.
• Tuvia’s licensing session. Licensing and updates are key components in Stonefield Query, so I’d like to compare Tuvia’s approach to ours.
• Christof’s unit testing session. Christof is a speaker’s speaker: he’s the one all speakers attend because his sessions are always so thought-provoking. Also, I’ve really gotten into unit testing in the past year, so I’d like to see his approach.

I’m very excited by this year’s lineup and think you will be too. Registration opens in a couple of weeks with a new online registration site. See you in October!