New VFP Blogger

Welcome to the blogosphere, Matt Slay.

Outlook 2007 RSS Feeds Not Refreshing

I’ve had this happen several times over the past couple of years: suddenly, Outlook no longer refreshes RSS feeds. The only solution I’d found to make it start re-reading the feeds was to select each one and click Send/Receive (or press F9). When you have more than 100 feeds, that’s time-consuming and painful.

Fortunately, Alun Jones found a faster (but still lame) way: just select each feed and it’ll refresh next time send/receive occurs. Hopefully MS will fix this.

Stonefield in the News Again

Grant Buckler of SoftwareCEO wrote an extensive article on Stonefield Software that was published today. It’s very well written and does a nice job of presenting business tips we’ve learned over the years.

Microsoft Virtual PC Video

I’m doing a session at Southwest Fox 2009 titled “Microsoft Virtual PC for VFP Developers.” VPC is one of the indispensible tools every developer ought to use (or if not VPC, one of its competitors such as VMWare), and yet many haven’t embraced it. Hopefully, this session will convince you to start using it immediately.

I created a short (5 minute) teaser video showing part of my session: how VPC is useful to test application installers to make sure all dependencies are included. Attendees of Southwest Fox will receive a complete white paper on installing, configuring, and using VPC. See you there!

Stonefield in National News

The Financial Post, a national newspaper in Canada, reprinted the article from our local newspaper profiling Stonefield Software.

Stonefield in the News

Stonefield was featured in the Business section of Saturday's local paper. They got a few things wrong:

• My title is actually Chief Technology Officer, not Chief Information Officer.
• I wish our sales were $5 million per year!
• We don't sell 220,000 units per year; we have 177,000 users in total.

Still, it's nice to get some PR.

Southwest Fox Super-Saver Deadline Approaching

June 30 is the deadline to save $125 and get a free half-day pre-conference session for Southwest Fox 2009. Registrations are already at last year’s numbers, so be sure to join us in sunny Arizona in October to hear the brightest VFP developers on the planet speak about our favorite development environment. See you there!

Register now

Speakers

Sessions

Racing Again

This past Saturday, the Regina YMCA once again held the event I look forward to all year: Echo Challenge. Our team, Thunder, competed in 2007 and 2008, and with three original members and three new ones, we were up to the challenge.

For the second year in a row, my Wednesday evening ride before Echo Challenge was marred by a bike crash. This time, it was on the cool-down part of my ride around beautiful Wascana Lake. As I came around a corner, a woman on another bike going the opposite direction was in my lane, coming right for me (she wanted to turn left but didn’t check for traffic first). We both tried to veer out of the way, but ended up side-swiping each other and down we went. My left wrist hit her bike, smashing my watch, spraining my wrist, and leaving a watch-shaped bruise. We both made sure the other was OK, and I continued on my way home. A couple of hours later, my right knee tightened up. By morning, I could barely walk because I could neither bend nor straighten my leg. Stretching and ice helped, but I figured Echo was no go this year, which really bummed me out. Fortunately, with lots of stretching, the knee loosened up a fair bit over the next couple of days, so I was able to ride after all.

Saturday started out cool and a little rainy, but by mid-morning, it was beautiful: about 24C (75F), cloudy, and some wind. I had a chance to meet our new team members, including our swimmer who’s only 12 (but a member of a local swim team).

The swim event was first: 750 m in the cold lake waters. That has to be the toughest leg, but Jamie did great, finishing in 13:34, good enough for 11th of 18 teams and almost nine minutes faster than last year’s swimmer. He tagged Lisa, our hill runner, who finished in 5:15 (placing her 10th) despite struggling with a sudden flare-up of asthma.

Here’s a photo of Nick and I waiting for the cycling leg to start. You can see the lake and the hills where the cycling route goes in the background.

Lisa tagged me and off I went. Although my knee was a little stiff, I managed a speed of about 45 kph (28 mph) for the 1.5 km to the start of the hills. I passed seven other cyclists, all in their twenties, and went down the final hill at over 50 kph (31 mph). However, I was significantly slower than last year: this year’s cycling leg was longer, but my time over the hill part of the race was 21:11 vs. 16:29 last year. Part of it was the knee, part was a head-wind we didn’t have last year, but the major part was I wasn’t in as good shape as I was last year. Here’s a shot of me at a relatively flat part of the hill section:

I ended up finishing 8th, which was pretty disappointing. However, there were a lot of new faces in the race this year, many of whom are serious athletes, and I was the second oldest cyclist, so I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad.

Here’s a shot of Nick and I at the end of the race:

I tagged Bob, who finished the 7 km run in 34:30, 1:30 faster than last year, 16th of the 18. Finally, Mike and Adrian finished with the 1.6 km canoe event. Their time of 32:33 was two minutes faster than last year, putting them in 17th.

Overall, we finished 17th out of 18 teams, not as good as last year, but it’s for a good cause. Unfortunately, donations were down this year, but hopefully we can get more teams out next year and get donations back up again.

Congratulations to the YMCA staff and volunteers for putting on a well-organized and fun event once again. I’m already dreaming of next year’s event!

Free SnagIt 7 Today Only

As posted on Digital Inspiration (a blog I highly recommend), until 5 P.M. Eastern today (June 5, 2009) only, you can get a free copy of SnagIt 7 (which is a couple of versions old) from TechSmith. This is a cool offer if you don’t already own SnagIt, a tool I find indispensible for creating screen shots for documentation and other purposes.

Stonefield Query 3.3 Video

We posted a 25-minute video showing some of the new features in Stonefield Query version 3.3.