Once again this year, Geek Gatherings is streaming the Southwest Fox keynote presentation, Thursday at 7:00 p.m. Mountain Standard Time (Arizona does not observe Daylight Savings Time). In addition, we are streaming the Project PolarFox: Sneak Preview session, Saturday at 5:15 p.m. Go to http://www.ustream.tv/channel/swfoxtv to watching the videos.
At one of the Southwest Fox bonus sessions on Friday night after the dinner party, I’m going to show the new version of Stonefield Query. Over two years in development, this is a complete rewrite in C#. Although we’ll eventually have a desktop version as well, the first release will be our web front-end. If you’re interested in seeing the future of Stonefield Query, even if you’re not currently using it, and you’re going to Southwest Fox, be sure to attend this session.
Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ have gone mobile! We’ve created a conference schedule on Guidebook, a popular mobile guide for events. Simply install the Guidebook app on your mobile device, then load the Southwest Fox/Xbase++ 2013 guide. You’ll be able to see complete session descriptions, view the conference schedule, see speaker photos and biographies, create to-do items, and best of all, create a customized schedule of sessions.
See http://swfox.net/Guidebook.aspx for details on how to set up our guide on your mobile device.
For the geeks among you (and who isn’t that reads this blog), here’s how we set up our Guidebook guide:
Thanks to Eric Selje for suggesting we look at Guidebook at last year’s conference. I know I’ll be using the guide personally, along with Dave Aring’s Kokopelli application to help me select which sessions to attend when.
See y’all in a couple of weeks!
"VFPX: Open Source Treasure for the VFP Developer", authored by Rick Schummer, Jim Nelson, Eric Selje, Tamar E. Granor, and me, is now available.
This book is organized so you can select any VFPX project you want to know more about and read about it in a single chapter (except for a few projects that are so big, a single chapter wasn't sufficient). By the time you finish the chapter, you know how to install the tool or component, what it does, and all the functionality it provides. The authors share the benefits and the shortcomings in great detail. This book saves you time and helps you improve your Visual FoxPro development experience and the way your applications work for your customers.
Get it today!
One last quick reminder: you can save $50 by registering with the early-bird registration discount. The deadline is this Saturday, August 31st. Every registered attendee gets admission and white papers to all regular conference sessions. www.swfox.net.
Thanks to the support of both the Visual FoxPro and Xbase++ communities, Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ will proceed as planned October 17-20 in Gilbert, AZ. As we said two weeks ago, Southwest Fox is one of the highlights of the year for us, despite (or maybe because of) the hundreds of hours that go into planning and running it. We are delighted that the Visual FoxPro community feels as we do, and voted with their wallets to keep it going.
If you haven’t yet registered, there’s still room for you. Register before September 1 for a $50 early-bird discount. Please continue to spread the word to your colleagues, clients, user group and anywhere else Visual FoxPro or Xbase++ is spoken.
See you in Gilbert in October.
Thanks to those of you who responded promptly to our message about the future of Southwest Fox. Registration has picked up, but we still need to hear from more of you before the Super-saver deadline.
June 30th is less than a week away and we thought we would pass along a reminder just in case you forgot to type it into your task list, or put a yellow sticky note on your monitor. We still need people to register to make the conferences happen.
The conference takes place October 17-20, 2013 in Gilbert, Arizona and we really hope you can be there. We would hate to see you miss out on the $125 discount and the free pre-conference session. The pre-conference sessions are quite popular this year.
Head over to the registration Web site today: http://geekgatherings.com/Registration. As promised, we are not cashing checks or processing credit cards for new registrations until the middle of July.
Already registered? Thanks. Can you help us remind your fellow developers who have been procrastinating about the looming deadline?
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 and Southwest Xbase++, that minimum is in the tens of thousands of dollars.
As of today, we have 14 people registered for Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2013. That’s about half the number of people who were registered at this time last year, and last year’s number took a big leap of faith on our part to carry on. See, our breakeven point is about 75 people, and according to our contract with the hotel, we have until July 2 to cancel or we’re on the hook for our guaranteed minimum whether there’s a conference or not.
Southwest Fox is one of the highlights of the year for Rick, Tamar and me. A ton of planning and work goes into organizing it, but we are happy to do it because we feel it’s an important way to keep our community going. We’re realistic enough to know that it won’t go on forever and each year could be the last. So, was 2012 the last year? You can help us make that decision. If you were thinking about going this year, vote to continue the conference by registering now. If you know others thinking of attending, share this message with them.
If we do end up cancelling, everyone who registered will get their money back in full, so you can’t lose out. (Just don’t make your flight reservation right way.)
The FoxShow #77 features an interview with Rick, Tamar, and I discussing this and other SWFox-related issues, so be sure to check it out. Andrew MacNeill also has a blog post about this.
Geek Gatherings is pleased to announce that the 2013 Ceil Silver Ambassador is Luis Maria Guayan. Luis is a well-known member of the Spanish FoxPro community, is one of the founders of PortalFox, is the project manager of the FoxBarcode VFPX project, and was a long-time MVP.
The Ceil Silver Ambassador 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.
The Fund is named in memory of Ceil Silver, a long-time member of the Visual FoxPro community, who passed away in January, 2009. Ceil served as Editor of FoxPro Advisor's Tips and Tricks column for many years and was the founder of the Westchester County FoxPro chapter of PADD, the Professional Association of Database Developers. She was also a contributing author to Special Edition Using Visual FoxPro 6. Ceil understood the value of attending professional conferences, and continued to attend them until her failing health prevented it.
The FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award honors those individuals who have contributed a great deal to the FoxPro community over the years. See http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~FoxProCommunityLifetimeAchievementAward~VFP for previous award recipients. These recipients wish to continue the award and have created a committee to select a recipient for 2013. The committee consists of all 14 living previous recipients, Alan Griver (yag), and Sergey Berezniker representing the FoxPro community. To submit your nominations for the 2013 recipients, please email me (dhennig@stonefield.com) by July 31, 2013.
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