Southwest Fox/Xbase++ 2015 Call for Speakers

The call has gone out!

We’re inviting anyone interesting in speaking at this year’s conferences to submit topics. You'll find the Call for Speakers at http://www.swfox.net/callforspeakers.aspx. Please read the complete Call for Speakers document (linked from that page), and use our proposal submission application at https://geekgatherings.com/Submission. Session proposals are due by March 9. (Yes, this is earlier than in prior years. We have some publicity plans that require us to have a little more lead time than in the past.)

As in the past few years, we plan to offer a good selection of topics in core VFP development, extending VFP, using VFP with other technologies, and VFPX, as well as technology sessions to help VFP developers become better developers, not just more expert at VFP. We are looking for a few sessions on paths forward for VFP developers and we’re looking for a few deep-dive post-conference sessions. The Call for Speakers also lists some topics last year’s attendees specifically requested.

Please don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions. We’re looking forward to seeing your proposals. We expect that, as usual, choosing among them will be one of the hardest things we do all year.

Blog Posts on Improving Performance in Stonefield Query

I posted a couple of entries today on the Stonefield Query blog about improving the performance of calculated fields and formulas. If you’re a Stonefield Query customer, I strongly recommend checking them out as they can improve the performance of your reports by orders of magnitude for not a lot of work:

Improving the Performance of Calculated Fields and Formulas, Part 1

Improving the Performance of Calculated Fields and Formulas, Part 2

Making TaskScheduler More Useful

A long time ago, I blogged about a couple of classes I wrote to schedule tasks using the Windows Task Scheduler. We use these classes in Stonefield Query to schedule report runs.

Recently, I add a few methods to the VistaTaskScheduler class (so named because it works using the Task Scheduler 2.0 API, which was added starting in Windows Vista; it works in Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and I’m guessing 10 as well) to enumerate tasks (GetTask), get a specific task (GetTask), and delete a task (DeleteTask). I added these because we’re adding a Scheduled Tasks dialog in the next version of Stonefield Query that’ll allow you to see which reports you’ve scheduled, see when the last time a schedule was run and what the result was, edit the settings of a schedule, and delete a schedule, all without having to open the Windows Task Scheduler.

You can download the updated code from the Technical Papers page of my web site.