Save the Dates for Southwest Fox 2015

Geek Gatherings LLC is officially asking you to save the dates for Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2015! The conferences take place October 15-18, 2015.

This year we again have two conferences as one great event at the same location. The conferences offer developers an opportunity to learn and extend their skills, and network with fellow developers. You get two conferences for the price of one!

The conferences take place at the San Tan Elegante Conference and Reception Center, the same great location as last year.

At the 2014 conferences, we mentioned our risks in running the conferences, primarily the tens of thousands of dollars we have to commit to the conference center. Fortunately, we found a way to mitigate those risks to an acceptable level, so we're happy to be hosting the conference again in 2015.

We choose speakers from the developer community based on their session proposals. We are always looking for new speakers. Watch the Call for Speakers page of the conference website; we'll post the Call for Speakers in mid-February.

All the details about registration, speakers, sessions, and more will be available in May.

Special Request!!!

If there are any topics you hope will be covered this year, please send them to info@geekgatherings.com, right away.

Guidebook for Southwest Fox/Xbase++ 2014

The Guidebook for Southwest Fox/Xbase++ 2014 is now available. If you haven’t used it before, it’s a very cool app that provides speaker bios, session abstracts, and schedules for our conference. You can create your own customized schedule of sessions, even on mobile devices other than iOS and Android, which is new this year. Also new is the ability to sign in as an attendee.

I discussed setup last year, but this year it was even easier because Guidebook now supports uploading speaker images and links. So there was hardly any manual setup at all.

Less than two weeks to go. I hope you’re all as excited as I am!

Discounts for Southwest Fox/Xbase++ 2014 Attendees

Alaska Software is offering special discounts on Xbase++ 2.0 for Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2014 attendees, as follows:

• Xbase++ 2.0 is available and shipping September 30, 2014.
• Prerequisite for this offer is registration to Southwest Xbase++ or Southwest Fox conference 2014.
• Get a 30% discount for all new customers purchasing Foundation Edition 2.0 (regular price USD $1,199) or Professional Edition 2.0 (regular price USD $1,999).
• Get an additional 10% Competitive Upgrade, if you provide proof of purchase of VFP 9 or Clipper.
• All attending Southwest Xbase++ who have a subscription (purchased in last 12 months) get 3 months extension for their current subscription.

How does this offer work? Simple: you contact Alaska Software at their booth during the conference, place your order, and get the boxed Xbase++ 2.0 DVD on the spot. This is also true for the active Xbase++ users who stop in at the Alaska Software booth.

Regardless of which edition of Xbase++ 2.0 you purchase, your savings goes a long way towards paying for the conference ticket.

We want to make Alaska’s offer even more attractive, so we’re extending our early-bird pricing for Southwest Fox/Xbase++ right up until Xbase++ 2.0’s September 30 ship date. Register for either conference before midnight September 30 and get a $50 discount; pay only $745.

Conference early-bird deadline approaches; So does Xbase++ 2.0

We have some very exciting news as we approach the early-bird registration deadline this Sunday, August 31st.

Alaska plans to ship Xbase++ 2.0 in September, so this will be the first conference where developers can learn all about the newly released Xbase++ v2.0. In addition, Alaska has deep discounts to offer conference attendees whether you’re upgrading from a prior version of Xbase++ or doing a competitive upgrade from Visual FoxPro or Clipper. So whether you are coming from an Xbase++, Clipper, or Visual FoxPro background, Alaska has a product you can learn about at the conference, buy at the conference, and start using immediately when you get home!

Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ is the place to be in October. Please sign up now to get the conferences’ $50 early-bird discount, which expires on September 1st. More details on the Xbase++ discounts coming soon.

Every registered attendee gets admission and white papers to all regular conference sessions. Don’t miss this chance to learn from the best and mix with your peers.

The FoxShow #79 is now available

Andrew MacNeill posted the latest version of the FoxShow featuring an interview with Rick, Tamar, and I about Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2014. If you haven't registered yet, be sure to listen for a special offer in the show.

Southwest Fox 2014: Super-Saver Deadline Coming Up Fast

June 30th is early next week and we thought we would remind you in case you forgot: We still need people to register to make Southwest Fox happen.

Putting on a conference is a risky endeavor. Conference centers require a guaranteed minimum income to block the dates of a conference; for a conference like Southwest Fox, that minimum is in the tens of thousands of dollars. We have to commit to the conference center by July 2nd and need your support by July 1st to make that commitment.

Head over to the registration Web site today: http://geekgatherings.com/Registration. We know most of you like to wait until the last minute to avoid the credit card bill arriving too soon. We will not charge any attendee credit cards or cash any checks until sometime in the second half of July or early August (once we've committed to going forward), so this no longer is a reason to wait.

Already registered? Thanks. Please help us remind your fellow developers who have been procrastinating about the looming deadline.

Registration for Southwest Fox now available

Registration for Southwest Fox (http://www.swfox.net/register.aspx) is now available. See http://www.swfox.net/speakers.aspx for a list of speakers and http://www.swfox.net/sessionsswfox.aspx for a list of sessions. Super-Saver Registration, which saves you $125, is available only through June 30th, so don't wait.
 
Putting on a conference is a risky endeavor. Conference centers require a guaranteed minimum income to block the dates of a conference; for a conference like Southwest Fox, that minimum is in the tens of thousands of dollars. We have to commit to the conference center by July 2nd and need your support by July 1st to make that commitment. We will not do "We need your help" appeals this year so please do not wait, get registered by June 30th! We know most of you like to wait until the last minute to avoid the credit card bill arriving too soon. We will not charge any attendee credit cards or cash any checks until sometime in the second half of July or early August (once we've committed to going forward), so this no longer is a reason to wait.

Rick, Tamar, and I look forward to seeing you in October!

Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2014 Speakers and Sessions Announced

Speakers and sessions for both conferences have been announced. Like we try to do every year, we have several new speakers this year: Matthew Olson and Phil Sherwood at SWFox and Peter Alderliesten and a to-be-named (but well-known to the community) speaker at SWXbase++.

We’re also glad to have back several speakers who haven’t presented at Southwest Fox in a few years: Bo Durban, Toni Feltman, Jim Nelson, and Kevin Ragsdale.

I’m really excited by the lineup of sessions this year. Some that I’m personally looking forward to are:

• Kevin’s Unicode Made Easier With SQLite: I’m working with both Unicode and SQLite so this session ought to have lots of ideas for me.
• Kevin’s More Multi-Threading With Visual FoxPro: his session at SWFox in 2011 was the talk of the conference so I’m interested to see what Kevin has up his sleeve this year.
• Jim’s Everything You DIDN'T Know About IntellisenseX: although I use Thor heavily every day, I haven’t done much with IntellisenseX so I’m looking forward to hearing from the master.
• Matthew’s WYSIWYG HTML Editing with VFP: this just sounds cool and I can definitely see using it one day.
• Steve’s Twitter Bootstrap: A Comprehensive Framework for Modern Web Development: if you’ve visited SWFox.net recently, you probably noticed its new appearance. We used Bootstrap so the site now looks great on both desktop and mobile devices (just for grins, check it out on a phone and then compare it to last year’s site). But we just scratched the surface of Bootstrap, so I’m looking forward to learning a lot more about it.
• Rick’s Refactoring VFP Code: If it Ain’t Broke, Fix it: Rick has become a speaker’s speaker; I always learn something from him and this session sounds like another killer presentation from “The Professor”.

Registration opens soon; send an email to info@geekgatherings.com if you want us to email you when it’s ready. See you in October!

Stonefield Query Enterprise

Stonefield Software Inc. is excited to announce the release of Stonefield Query Enterprise, the newest version of our award-winning Stonefield Query product line.

Stonefield Query Enterprise is a complete rewrite from scratch using the C# language for the back-end engine components and ASP.NET MVC for the web front-end. The new version allows us to take advantage of the latest technologies.

Here are some of the features of this new product:

• Web UI: the current version of Stonefield Query is a desktop application. While it works great for the over 200,000 people using Stonefield Query, many of you want reporting for your web applications. Stonefield Query Enterprise gives you that solution.
  
• New reporting features: Stonefield Query Enterprise has many new features that are difficult or impossible to add to the current version. Some of these new features include:
  
  
  • Support for sub-reports
    
  • Displaying HTML and rich text with full formatting
    
  • Availability of other types of controls such as bar codes, QR codes, and check boxes
    
  • Sorting on group totals
    
  • Support for multiple column fields in cross-tab reports
    
  • Better localization of reports: headings appear in the language of the user running the report, not the one who created it
    
  • And many other great new features
    
• Rich API: every aspect of Stonefield Query Enterprise is exposed through our API. This makes it dead simple to integrate with your own application. You can create and run reports programmatically, manage security, or dynamically update the data dictionary as necessary.
  
• Extendible: you’ve always been able to extend and control the features of Stonefield Query through scripting. In Stonefield Query Enterprise, plugins take this to the next level. Because plugins have full access to the Stonefield Query object model, you can customize Stonefield Query Enterprise in ways you could only dream of before.
  
• Support for multi-tenant applications: Stonefield Query Enterprise was designed to work in a multi-tenant environment. Whether you have one database with row-level security for all customers or one database per customer, Stonefield Query Enterprise has you covered. Users can only see the records and reports for their own company. Of course, it works just fine in a single customer environment too.
  
• Updated Stonefield Query Studio: the developer part of Stonefield Query got a facelift too. It integrates with your custom plugins and functions so they’re available for expressions. Join trees give you fine control over how indirectly related tables are joined. You can now preview the contents of calculated fields and virtual tables and test joins between real and virtual tables. Value converters, either built-in or your own, change how the contents of a field appears in a report.
  
• Source code: we provide the source code for the web UI, allowing you to customize it to suit your needs. Changes can be a simple as altering styles in CSS files for a different look to changing controllers and views for different workflow or implementing different security rules.

Of course, Stonefield Query Enterprise still has the features that made Stonefield Query one of the few true user reporting solutions available, including:

• Ease-of-use: Your users don't have to know what a join is, let alone how to create a join for a particular set of tables. They don't have to know the names of tables and fields. They don't have to know how the data is stored. They simply tell Stonefield Query what they want and it figures out how to get the data they need. The simple “wizard” interface allows them to create reports in minutes, not hours.
  
• Report scheduling: Create as many schedules to run as many reports at any time as you wish, making report deployment a snap.
  
• Multi-database support: Stonefield Query can run reports on data stored in different databases, even if they use different engines. For example, you can create a report that shows customer information from a Microsoft SQL Server database and project information from an Oracle database. Create consolidation reports that pull, for example, invoices from different company databases onto a single report.
  
• Configurable: Customize Stonefield Query for your application. The data dictionary describes what the databases Stonefield Query can access look like: the tables, fields, and relationships between the tables; captions for tables and fields; output formatting for fields; and so on. Customize the behavior of Stonefield Query by changing configuration settings, such as whether users can schedule reports.
  
• Brandable: Easily create a private labeled or branded version of Stonefield Query. This allows you to distribute Stonefield Query as your own branded product, so your users won't know it's Stonefield Query from Stonefield Software; they'll think it's something you created just for them. This also allows you to sell your branded version for whatever price fits your business model.
  
• Localizable: Stonefield Query is fully localizable. Every dialog caption and message displayed to the user in Stonefield Query is defined in resource files. You can easily create multi-lingual versions of Stonefield Query, with each user working in the language they're most comfortable with.

Check out Stonefield Query Enterprise today. If you want to try it with your own data, download the demo from http://stonefieldquery.com/ (choose “Web version” from the Download menu). If you’d rather try out the report designer without installing anything, click the “Try it now” button at http://stonefieldquery.com/ to run the demo on our web site against the famous Northwind sample database.

Updated Web Site

Stonefield Query isn’t a single product; rather, it’s a family of products. On one hand, we have customized versions for specific applications, such as Stonefield Query for Sage 300 and Stonefield Query for ACT!. On the other, we have the Stonefield Query SDK, which any developer or consultant can use to create a customized reporting solution for any application. (In fact, we used the SDK to create the customized versions.) Unfortunately, that made our web site a bit of a mixed bag: we had to make it useful to two different audiences, which led to some awkward navigation. As a result, we’ve split the site into two:

• StonefieldQuery.com, the existing site, is now just for the SDK and our newest product, Stonefield Query Enterprise, a web version of Stonefield Query.
  
• StonefieldSoftware.com is a new site dedicated to our custom solutions.

Links in the Solutions menu of both sites take you to the other one.

We also used this as an opportunity to revamp the site, making it more modern and responsive on mobile devices.

Check out the new sites and let us know what you think; your feedback is important to us and much appreciated.

Southwest Fox 2014 Call for Speakers Reminder

Just a reminder that session proposals for Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2014 are due by 8 AM EDT this Friday, March 21. If you’re interested in speaking, please see http://www.swfox.net/callforspeakers.aspx for instructions. We look forward to hearing from you.

Call for Speakers - Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2014

We've issued the Call for Speakers for both conferences. If you are interested in presenting at either conference, please check out http://www.swfox.net/callforspeakers.aspx.