Nominations for 2011 Ceil Silver Ambassador

The Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund brings a developer to the Southwest Fox conference in the United States as an ambassador for the developers in his or her country. This gives the recipient the opportunity to meet and share experiences with developers attending Southwest Fox and gives other attendees the opportunity to learn about VFP development in the recipient's country. For more information on the Ambassador Fund or to learn how to contribute to it, please see http://www.swfox.net/ambassador.aspx.

The Ambassador selection committee consists of Southwest Fox organizers Rick Schummer, Tamar Granor, and Doug Hennig, former Ambassadors Emerson Santon Reed, Cesar Chalom, and Bernard Bout, and VFP community members Christof Wollenhaupt, Rick Bean, and Alex Feldstein.

We are looking for nominations from the VFP community for the 2011 recipient. To nominate someone you think is deserving to be selected, please email their name and a brief list of their contributions to the VFP community to ambassadorfund@swfox.net. Names must be submitted no later than April 15, 2011.

The Spirit of the Community

César once again shows why the VFP community is alive and well. First, he released a new version of his very cool FoxCharts charting tool. This is a tool that is easily as powerful as many commercial charting tools and yet César has generously donated it and his time to our community. Second, he is actively requesting donations from FoxCharts users, but not for himself: he asks that donations go to the Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund. This fund raises money from the VFP community to bring a developer to the Southwest Fox conference as an ambassador for the developers in his or her country. This gives the recipient the opportunity to meet and share experiences with developers attending Southwest Fox and gives other attendees the opportunity to learn about VFP development in the recipient's country.

Thanks, César, for all you do and for your very strong commitment to the VFP community. César’s generosity and spirit of community should be an inspiration to us all.

Southwest Fox 2011 Call For Speakers

Today we released the Call for Speakers for Southwest Fox 2011. Anyone interested in presenting should visit the Call for Speakers page on the Southwest Fox website, read the complete Call for Speakers document (linked from that page), and download the proposal submission application. Session proposals are due by March 28.

As in the past few years, we 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.

If you think you have something to say to the VFP community, please submit session proposals, even if you’ve never spoken at a conference before. Our community is strengthened when more people take an active role. Do be aware that speaking at a conference is a serious commitment. Even for experienced speakers, preparing a new session takes 40-80 hours. Doing it well at the conference calls for several rehearsals beforehand, too. So make sure you can commit the necessary time; the Call for Speakers lays out all the deadlines.

We’re looking forward to seeing what you all come up with. Reading through the proposals we receive each year is really exciting, and choosing among them is always a challenge.

Running Network Applications on Windows 7

Like many developers, I like using Windows Virtual PC for testing applications. Today I needed to test running Stonefield Query from a network share, so I started a virtual machine (VM), connected it to the drive on my host system, ran the Stonefield Query workstation installer to install just required runtime files on the VM, and then ran SFQuery.exe from the “server”. I immediately got a “The application failed to initialize properly (0xc000000F)” error. At first I thought something wasn’t installed properly, but a search found this Microsoft KnowledgeBase article:

Error message when you try to open a network-shared application on a client computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2: 0xc000000f

Apparently this is a known issue and you can request a hotfix to resolve it. After installing it, all was well.

Southwest Fox 2010 Keynote Videos

Bernard Bout has kindly uploaded HD videos of the Southwest Fox 2010 keynote. Whether you were at the conference or couldn’t make it, you’ll want to watch them. Craig Boyd gives what must be the funniest keynote at any conference ever.

Windows Vista Articles

Since Advisor is closing online access to their articles, I have put a copy of my “Developing VFP Applications for Windows Vista” white paper, the source material for a couple of articles I wrote for Advisor, on the Technical Papers page of Stonefield’s web site.

Southwest Fox 2011 Announced

Mark your calendars! Southwest Fox 2011 will take place on October 26-29, 2011 with a post-conference event on the afternoon of October 29 and morning of October 30. Note a few changes this year:

• The shift not only from the second week in October to the last week (to avoid running into Jewish holy days).
• The shift from our usual Thursday to Sunday dates to Wednesday to Saturday this year (so you can get home in time for Halloween).
• The post-conference starts Saturday afternoon rather than the next day.

By the way, the post-conference event is guaranteed to blow your socks off, so you'll definitely want to consider staying the extra day. Stay tuned for more details.

Another Windows Virtual PC Gotcha

Microsoft Virtual PC, for Windows Vista and earlier, automatically writes changes from the undo disk (VUD file) to the main drive (VHD file) when you shut a virtual machine (VM) down. So, when you’re setting up a VM or otherwise want to make permanent the changes you made while using it, you just shut it down and tell it to save the changes. When you do something where you don’t want the changes saved, such as doing a test install, you shut it down and tell it to discard the changes. Very straightforward.

Windows Virtual PC, for Windows 7, doesn’t automatically write changes from the VUD to the VHD. When you shut a VM down and don’t tell it to discard changes, it continues to build up changes you make over various sessions to the VUD file. When you want to write the changes to the VHD, you have to specifically edit the settings for the VM, choose the Undo Disks page, and click Apply.

Until I realized this, I couldn’t understand why a VM I had set up kept reverting to an earlier state. I started the VM, made some changes I wanted permanent, then shut it down, thinking that the changes would be written to the VHD (although I did notice that the shutdown process was a LOT faster than I was expecting). I then fired it up again, did a test install, and shut it down, discarding changes. When I started it back up again, it was at the original state, without the changes I thought I’d made permanent. I also noticed that the datetime stamp on the VHD file hadn’t changed.

After a couple of rounds of this, I started poking around to see what I had to do to write changes to the VHD. That’s when I discovered the Apply button in the Undo Disks pages of the Settings dialog. Hopefully my pointing this out will save someone else some time.

Updating Integration Components in a Windows Virtual PC VM

I’ve been using Microsoft Virtual PC for several years. It’s great for testing installs, installing applications you don’t want polluting your host system, and lots of other things. I recently bought a new laptop with Windows 7, so I installed the latest version of Virtual PC, renamed to Windows Virtual PC.

When starting some of my existing virtual machines (VMs), I was prompted to upgrade the integration components. Integration components make it easier to work with a VM because they allow access to resources of the host system including (new to the Windows 7 version) USB devices. In Windows XP VMs, it’s easy: choose Yes when asked and follow the prompts. In Windows Vista and Windows 7 VMs, however, it’s a little tricky:

• Choose Yes when asked to update.
• In the dialog that appears allowing you to either run Setup.exe or open a folder, choose Open folder.
• In the Windows Explorer folder that appears, right-click Setup.exe and choose Run as Administrator.
• Follow the prompts until you get a dialog telling you that certain files are in use. Note the process ID for each one.

• Click Ctrl+Alt+Del in the VM menu and choose Start Task Manager and select the Processes page.
• If you don’t see a PID column, select the Select Columns function from the View menu, turn on PID, and click OK.
• Click the PID column to sort on process ID.
• Click the Show processes from all users button.
• Select each of the process IDs for the files in use and click End Process.
• Carry on with the rest of the installation process (it’ll require a couple of restarts for your VM).

One thing I don’t like about Windows Virtual PC is that it doesn’t support dragging and dropping files from your host system to the VM window and vice versa. Instead, with integration enabled, you have to open Windows Explorer, navigate to the appropriate drive on your host system, and copy files to and from that way. Not a huge problem but more work than with the older Virtual PC.

Microsoft Office 2010 Gotcha

I have a nice new shiny toy: an Asus G73JW laptop with an Intel i7-740QM quad core processor, Windows 7 Pro (64-bit), 17.3” LED display, 8 GB of RAM, a 80 GB solid state primary drive, and a 500 GB secondary drive. Of course, the bad thing about getting a new system is the time it takes to get it set up just so, but I have a checklist I work from to make the setup straightforward. Things were going great until today. Emailing from Stonefield Query using MAPI (which means it goes through Outlook) and reading Excel spreadsheets using the Excel ODBC driver no longer work.

Rick Schummer blogged about issues with a client who upgraded to Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2010. My issues aren’t the same, but are related: I foolishly chose to install the 64-bit version of Office rather than the 32-bit version, and now my 32-bit apps no longer work with it. I guess this falls into the DOH! category. Hopefully if you’re setting up a new system or upgrading an existing one, you’ll be a little smarter than me.