Southwest Fox 2018

Once again, Southwest Fox 2018 exceeded all of my expectations. Everyone seemed really excited about the sessions and being back to meet old and new friends. I met a couple of people who I only knew online so it was nice finally meeting them in person. And of course there’s nothing like hanging out with old friends, some of whom I’ve known for more than 20 years.

I almost lost my voice before the start of one of my sessions but fortunately Christof Wollenhaupt gave me a package of Fisherman’s Friend, which those in attendance can attest worked quickly and amazingly well. I’m taking Christof’s suggestion and keeping some in my backpack from now on just in case.

Congratulations to the 2018 VFPX Administrators Award winner Tore Bleken for all of the work he did on documentation for Thor, IntelliSenseX, and Win32API.

We announced dates for next year's conference already: October 24 - 27, 2019. I hope to see you in Phoenix next year!

Update: the keynote presentation can now be viewed online.

New VFPX Project: Log4VFP

I released a new project on VFPX this week: Log4VFP. Log4NET is a powerful diagnostic logging library for .NET applications. Log4VFP provides a VFP wrapper for Log4NET, allowing you to add advanced logging features to your VFP applications. I’ll be showing it in my VFPX 2018 Edition session at Southwest Fox next month.

Southwest Fox 2018: Early-bird deadline approaches

Simple quick reminder: save $50 by registering before the early-bird registration deadline next Tuesday, July 31st.

If you still need to register, please head over to the registration Web site today: http://geekgatherings.com/Registration

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.

See you in October!

Southwest Fox 2018 is a go!

We have some good news to share. Thanks to the support of the Visual FoxPro community, a very generous supporter who made a large donation, and our many sponsors, Southwest Fox 2018 will proceed as planned October 18-21, 2018 in Gilbert, AZ.

We really appreciate all the support people have shown for the conference with early registrations! That said, the decision comes with a serious calculated risk because we are still many registrations short of the breakeven point. Please continue to spread the word to your colleagues, clients, user groups and anywhere else Visual FoxPro is spoken.

If you haven't yet registered, there's still room for you. Register before August 1st for a $50 early-bird discount.

The Fox Show #83

Listen to Andrew MacNeill’s FoxShow podcast featuring Rick, Tamar, and I talking about Southwest Fox 2018.

Southwest Fox 2018 Super-Saver Deadline Approaches

Registration for Southwest Fox 2018 has been open for a few weeks and there’s less than a week until the Super-Saver Registration deadline. If you register before the end of June, you save $125 and we’ll throw in a pre-conference session worth $99. Not only that, but you’ll be entered in the drawings for a scholarship that will reduce your cost even more and a license of Stonefield Query SDK, a $2,500 value. Check out the speakers and topics on the conference website.

Please beat the rush so we still have some fingernails left when July begins! No need to wait, we won’t charge your card or cash your check until the middle of July!

Presenting Session on Project Explorer

I’m presenting “Introducing Project Explorer” this Saturday 2018-06-09 at 10:00 EDT for GRAFUG but anyone’s welcome to attend online: https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/884386213. See grafug.com/topics.htm for the description of the session.

Update: a recording of the presentation is available at https://youtu.be/G43sUwYlDJ0

Southwest Fox 2018 Registration Now Open

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 send out any "We need your help" appeals so please do not wait; register 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 we have committed to going forward (sometime after July 2), so this is not is a reason to wait.

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

Improvements in Project Explorer

Thanks to many suggestions from the Fox community, I’ve made lots of improvements to the Project Explorer VFPX project since I presented it at Southwest Fox in October 2017 and the German DevCon in November 2017.

Creating new classes and forms

When you click the New button in the toolbar for classes, the New Class dialog appears:

It has similar functionality to that dialog in the Project Manager, with these additional features:

• Based on is set to the name of the selected class if there is one. This makes it easy to subclass an existing class by simply selecting it and clicking the New button.
• From is set to the selected VCX but it’s a combobox containing the ten most recently used class libraries, so you can select one from the list. Based on adjusts to display the classes in the selected library. The libraries are listed in most recent to least recent order.
• You can create a new class by subclassing the Based on class or by copying it (the equivalent of dragging a class from one VCX to another and then renaming it in the Project Manager).

To create a form from a form class, right-click the class and choose Create Form from Class, then specify the name and path of the new form in the file dialog that appears.

Performance improvements

• At startup, the project was opened and closed multiple times in order to get the version control status of all files. That no longer happens.
• If only the text equivalents of binary files are stored in the repository, Project Explorer no longer closes the project when committing changes to a file or getting the version control status of a file.
• Rather than having a single TreeView control that’s constantly emptied and reloaded as you change the selected tag, there’s now one TreeView per tag. Selecting a tag the first time loads and displays that TreeView, including getting the version control status of every file in that tag, and hides the other ones; the next time that tag is selected, the TreeView isn’t reloaded but is simply redisplayed. This makes the performance of switching tags in a large project much faster.

Version control improvements

• Project Explorer now works properly with Git even when TortoiseGit isn’t installed.
• Support was added for other “binary to text” converters besides FoxBin2PRG; implementing them is left up to others.
• You can now change the setting of the Binary Files in Repository setting in the Version Control Properties dialog.
• The shortcut menu now has Convert Binary to Text and Convert Text to Binary functions. This is handy, for example, if you edit the records in a table for which the text equivalent is stored in the repository.
• Project Explorer now supports FoxBin2PRG configuration settings better.
• When version control is turned on for a solution, it now automatically detects if a repository folder exists and only prompts the user if one isn’t found.
• When dragging a class to another VCX, Project Explorer assigns new UNIQUEID values to the members of the new class. This prevents an issue with duplicate values in FoxBin2PRG.

Other changes

• The Class Library and Class Name labels in the Servers tab of the project properties are now hyperlinked: clicking them takes you to the VCX or class, respectively.
• If Solution.xml exists in the current folder, it’s opened automatically rather than prompting the user. Also, if there’s only one PJX file in the current folder and no Solution.xml, Project Explorer automatically opens that project and creates a solution file for it.
• You can now define both the forecolor and backcolor for categories and specify which color is the Category combobox. Also, the solution is reloaded when you close the Category Editor dialog so changes are displayed immediately.
• You can now edit the OLEPublic and icon properties of a class in Project Explorer without having to use the Class Designer.
• The shortcut menu now has a Builder function which invokes the same builder or builder dialog you would see in the Project Manager.
• The shortcut menu for the User and Description editboxes now has a Zoom function that displays a resizable dialog in which you can view or edit the content of the editbox.
• Pressing Enter in the TreeView control now acts like double-clicking.
• If you manually close a project, Project Explorer automatically closes when it’s activated.
• The Refresh button in the toolbar was replaced with a Sort/Filter button. Refresh is now available in the shortcut menu.
• Clicking the “…” button in the Sort and Filter and Assign Tags dialogs displays the VFP Expression Builder dialog.
• Project items now have a CategoryName property so you can filter on that rather than the category’s ID number. Also, the Tags property is now a comma-delimited list of tags instead of a collection for easier filtering.
• There are a couple of new addins. AddWLCHackCXtoShortcutMenu.prg adds a Run HackCX Professional function to the shortcut menu to launch Hack CX Professional (http://www.whitelightcomputing.com/prodhackcxpro.htm). EditViewWithViewEditorPro.prg tells Project Explorer to edit a view using White Light Computing’s ViewEditor Professional (http://www.whitelightcomputing.com/prodvieweditorpro.htm) rather than the VFP View Designer.
• The Run function now works for classes. For non-form classes, the class is instantiated and added to _SCREEN at position 0, 0. For form classes, the class is instantiated and a reference to it added to _SCREEN.
• Turn on the new Add and New allow any file type setting in the Options dialog to allow the Add and New functions to display a dialog in which you can choose any file type. Turn it off to only allow a file of the selected type to be chosen; for example, if a form is currently selected, Add and New only allow you to add or create a form.
• Turn on the Remove unused headers setting in the Options dialog to remove headers that don’t have any items under them in the TreeView, such as “Labels” if there aren’t any labels in the project.
• Project Explorer can now be installed or updated using the Thor Check for Updates function.
• Running Project Explorer with “do ProjectExplorer.app with '?'” displays a help message with the parameters you can pass to it.
• Numerous bugs were fixed.

Presenting Session on Bootstrap

I’m presenting “Creating Beautiful Web Sites Using Bootstrap” this Saturday 2018-05-12 at 10:00 EDT for GRAFUG but anyone’s welcome to attend online: https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/758734237. See grafug.com/topics.htm for the description of the session. Note that this session has been updated to discuss Bootstrap version 4.

Update: a recording of the presentation is available at https://youtu.be/eC2oZ8ZkxMM

Southwest Fox 2018 Speakers and Sessions Announced

Speakers and sessions for Southwest Fox 2018 have been announced. We’re excited about first-time speaker James Heuer and having well-known speaker Kevin McNeish back.

Some sessions I’m personally looking forward to seeing are:

• Rick Borup’s Responsive Web Design with CSS: I’m always looking for ways to improve my web development skills and Rick is one of the best speakers around.
• James’ Python as a Way Forward for VFP Developers: I haven’t done anything in Python so I’m interested in learning something about this popular language.
• Rick Strahl’s Marking up the World with Markdown: Rick’s sessions are always thought-provoking plus I’m doing a lot more with Markdown these days.
• Christoph’s What You Need to Know about Character Encoding: this is a topic most VFP developers know little about but is becoming more important.

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!

New VFPX Projects

There are six new VFPX projects:

• FastXTab is a replacement for VFPXTab.prg that creates cross-tab tables and cursors. This is an updated version of the class, originally created by Alexander Golovlev, by Vilhelm-Ion Praisach.

• Win32API provides documentation for calling hundreds of Win32API functions from VFP. This project was generously donated to VFPX by Anatoliy Mogylevets from its original source, news2news.com, which is no longer available. Tore Bleken converted the documentation into Markdown format.

• Name Syntax Checker verifies the correctness and controls the translation of a string into a syntactically correct name of a particular domain (the name of VFP variables or fields, the name of XML elements, etc.). This and the rest of the projects are from António Lopes.

• CalendarCalc provides a set of classes to perform specific calendrical processing tasks, help with internationalization, and build multicultural solutions.

• CSVProcessor extends VFP capabilities of CSV file handling.

• XML Library Set extends the VFP XML processing capabilities.

It’s great to see the VFP community continuing to provide features to our beloved development platform!

Fixing Chrome Freezing

I put my Windows 10 machine to sleep when I’m done for the day. For the past month or so, after awaking from sleep, Chrome would take forever (at least 2 minutes but usually a lot more) to refresh or open a web page. Restarting always resolved the problem but that eliminates the benefit of sleep mode. I’d Googled this issue before and hadn’t found any useful results but I tried again yesterday and found a suggestion that worked: turn off automatically detecting proxy settings. To get at that setting, click Start, type “settings” to bring up Windows Settings, choose Network & Internet, choose Proxy, and turn off Automatically Detect Settings.

Presenting Session on wwDotNetBridge

I’m presenting “Practical Uses of wwDotNetBridge to Extend Your VFP Applications” this Saturday 2018-02-10 at 10:00 EST for GRAFUG but anyone’s welcome to attend online: global.gotomeeting.com/join/441727213. See grafug.com/topics.htm for the description of the session.

Save the Dates for Southwest Fox 2018

Geek Gatherings LLC is officially asking you to save the dates for Southwest Fox 2018! The conference takes place October 18-21, 2018 at the San Tan Elegante Conference and Reception Center, the same great location as last year.

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 late February.

As in prior years, we run a substantial risk in running the conference, primarily the tens of thousands of dollars we have to commit to the conference center. So, once again, we ask you to register for the conference before the July 1 deadline so we can make our go or no-go decision.

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.

Stonefield Query for AccountMate webinars

Stonefield is presenting a webinar for AccountMate Business Partners on Stonefield Query for AccountMate and our new ClickBase competitive upgrade on Wednesday, January 17, 2018 at 1:00 Eastern. Register today on the AccountMate Business Partner web site.

We are also presenting a webinar for AccountMate users on Stonefield Query for AccountMate and our new ClickBase competitive upgrade on Wednesday, February 7, 2018 at 1:00 Eastern. Register today at https://www.accountmate.com/education/webcasts.asp