Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2016 Speakers and Sessions Announced

Speakers and sessions for both conferences have been announced. We have three new speakers this year: Alec Gagne, Andreas Gehrs-Pahl, and Chris McGuinness. I’ve known Alec and Chris for a while and am looking forward to meeting Andreas. We also have three speakers who spoken before but not in a few years: Venelina Jordanova, Jody Meyer, and Eric Selje.

I think I’m more excited about the session lineup this year than ever before. Some sessions I’m personally looking forward to seeing are:

• Rick Strahl’s 10 Cool Examples of Using wwDotnetBridge to Extend Your FoxPro Code. I said during one of my sessions last year that wwDotNetBridge is the future of VFP, and I still think that today. I use wwDotNetBridge extensively and am always looking for new ideas.
• Rick Borup’s Introduction to Microsoft Power BI. I know little about Power BI but being in the reporting market myself, it’s something I need to learn about, and who better from than “The Professor”.
• I’d also like to see Rick Borup’s Hands-on Branching and Merging with Distributed Version Control Systems session, but it’s a pre-conference session and they’re tough to attend as an organizer. Fortunately, Rick writes great white papers.
• Eric’s OneNote to Rule Them All. I hadn’t thought of automating OneNote so this opens up lots of new possibilities.
• Chris’s Leveraging the Power of Amazon for Your FoxPro and Xbase++ Applications. This is another topic I don’t know much about but am interested in learning.
• Christof Wollenhaupt’s On the Dark Side of FoxPro and The Security Cookbook. Christof knows more about the internals of VFP than just about anyone and his sessions are both fun and fascinating.

I’m also really pumped about my two sessions: Creating Beautiful Web Sites Easily Using Bootstrap and Lessons Learned in Version Control. In fact, I’m so stoked, I’ve already started working on the white papers, which is a couple of months earlier than usual for me.

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