Fixing Yet Another Report Designer Issue

Last month I blogged about an issue in the VFP Report Designer that causes a “printer not ready” error if you don’t have a default printer set up, as is sometimes the case in a Terminal Server environment. Recently I discovered a related issue: the same error occurs when opening the Page Setup dialog. The cause is the SET(‘PRINTER’, 3) statement in the LoadDeviceInfo method of FRXDeviceHelper in _FRXCursor.VCX. The fix is to wrap that statement in a TRY structure.

2011 Southwest Fox Speaker Award

Cathy Knight (then Cathy Pountney) was the top-ranked Southwest Fox 2008 speaker, as measured by attendee evaluations. Her friends Toni Feltman and Jody Meyer felt that she deserved an award for this accomplishment, so they created one and presented it to her at the keynote of the 2009 conference. They filled the cup with chocolates because that’s Cathy’s favorite food (not dessert, food).

Since then, it’s been a tradition for the winner to present the award to the next year’s top-ranked speaker, so Cathy presented it to Rick Schummer for being the top speaker in 2009 and Rick presented it to me for 2010. I had the pleasure of presenting the award for 2011 to Rick Borup. You can watch the presentation at the 19:50 mark of the streaming keynote. Rick has always been one of my favorite speakers: he’s extremely well-prepared and his sessions are always thought-provoking. We filled the award with unshelled peanuts because Rick is a huge baseball (and peanut) fan. Rick unselfishly shared the peanuts with attendees of his sessions. I went to both of his sessions for 2012, Advanced Topics in Mercurial: Taking it to the Next Level and Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing for Fun and Profit, and think he’s a likely candidate to win it again.

Congratulations and well-deserved, Rick!

2012 Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients

At the keynote for Southwest Fox 2012, we had the pleasure of announcing this year’s recipients of the FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award: Cathy Knight and Craig Boyd. If you couldn’t make it to the conference, you can watch the awards being presented at the 24:33 mark of the streaming keynote.

Cathy is the reigning queen of reporting for Visual FoxPro. In fact, both of her sessions at Southwest Fox were how to get the most of the Report Writer and were among the most popular sessions. I’ve used her tips in countless places in Stonefield Query and it’s a much better product as a result. You can read Cathy’s bio and her thoughts on winning the award.

Craig has one of the best VFP blogs on the planet and has developed some of the most insanely useful tools around. I’ve written numerous articles about them in FoxRockX and Rick Schummer did a session about some of Craig’s tools; both just barely scratched the surface. I also use several of his tools and techniques in Stonefield Query. Craig couldn’t be at Southwest Fox to accept the award in person (Bo Durban accepted it on his behalf) but I’ve been assured he watched the streaming keynote. You can read Craig’s bio here.

Congratulations to both Cathy and Craig. Well-deserved!

2012 VFPX Administrators’ Award

The VFPX Administrators’ Award is an annual award given by the VFPX Administrators (Craig Boyd, Rick Schummer, and Doug Hennig) to recognize those people who made outstanding contributions to the VFP community through their projects on VFPX. The nominees this year were:

• Matt Slay for GoFish and Dynamic Forms
• Jim Nelson for Thor and IntelliSenseX
• Guillermo Carrero & Luis Maria Guyan for FoxBarCode

At the keynote for Southwest Fox 2012, the award was given to both Matt and Jim. Both have done an incredible amount of work this year. Congratulations to both and thanks for all your efforts in making VFPX the future of VFP.

Last Minute Southwest Fox/Xbase++ 2012 Notes

Here are a few last-minute things about this year’s conferences:

• Due to unforeseen circumstances, the Kokopelli scheduling application will not be available this year.
• We are streaming the keynote presentation again this year, Thursday at 7:00 p.m. Mountain Standard Time (Arizona does not observe Daylight Savings Time): http://www.ustream.tv/channel/swfoxtv
• The conference guide is now available for download. Please download and read it because there are important details about the conference you need to know. This is the only copy of the guide you are getting; in our continuing efforts to make our conference greener, we are not printing them this year.

Yet another reason to attend Southwest Fox/Southwest Xbase++

Yet another reason to attend Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2012! All registered attendees at Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ are eligible to win one of two one-year subscriptions for Visual Studio Professional with MSDN, each worth $799. Register today: http://www.swfox.net/register.aspx