Reminder about 2013 Ceil Silver Ambassador

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.

We are looking for nominations from the VFP community for the 2013 recipient. To nominate someone you think deserves 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 May 31, 2013.

In addition, we are looking for donations to allow us to pay for the travel costs for the ambassador. We urge you to consider donating any amount you see fit, small or large, to this fund. See http://www.swfox.net/ambassador.aspx for details. 100% of donated money goes to the travel costs for the ambassador. Not a single penny is used to cover administrative costs. All time managing the fund and working through the selection process is donated. No one is paid for their time.

Southwest Fox 2013 Registration Now Open

Geek Gatherings LLC has officially opened registration for Southwest Fox 2013! The developer conference will be held October 17-20, 2013 at the SanTan Elegante Conference and Reception Center, the same great location as last year. Last year was a huge success.

Super-Saver Registration, which saves you $125, is available only through June 30th, so don't wait. Head over to the registration Web site today: http://geekgatherings.com/Registration

Registration fees are the same as last year! More details are available on the conference's registration page.

Southwest Fox 2013 Speakers and Sessions Announced

Speakers and sessions for Southwest Fox 2013 have been announced. Like we try to do every year, we have a couple of new speakers this year: Hank Fay and David Giard.

You may notice that rather than having separate speaker pages for Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ (a conference held concurrently with Southwest Fox), we’ve combined them into one. The reason for that is some sessions apply to both conferences, such as Tamar Granor’s Office 365: An IT Department for Small Businesses session and David Giard’s How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love jQuery session.

Some of the sessions I’m personally looking forward to are:

• Rick Borup’s Multi-Track Development Strategies in DVCS session. The past couple of years, Rick did killer sessions on Mercurial, so I’m looking forward to moving to the next level.
• Hank’s Moving VFP Applications to the Cloud Using Lianja session. I don’t know much about Lianja so I want to see what it’s about.
• Eric Selje’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Continuous Integration and VFP session. CI is another topic I don’t know much about so I’m expecting Eric to enlighten me.
• Andrew MacNeill’s Crushing the User's Experience: Building the Right (and Wrong) UI session. As you may know, UI is a subject near to my heart, so I’d like to hear Andrew’s take on it.

I’m very excited by this year’s lineup and think you will be too. Registration opens in a couple of weeks. See you in October!

2013 Ceil Silver Ambassador

The Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund brings 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 trip is paid for by the VFP community's donations to the Fund.

We are looking for nominations from the VFP community for the 2013 recipient. The Ambassador selection committee consists of Southwest Fox organizers Rick Schummer, Tamar Granor, and Doug Hennig, former Ambassadors Emerson Santon Reed, Cesar Chalom, Bernard Bout, Borislav Borissov, and Jun Tangunan, and VFP community members Christof Wollenhaupt and Rick Bean. To nominate someone you think deserves 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 May 31, 2013.

In addition, we are looking for donations to allow us to pay for the travel costs for the ambassador. We urge you to consider donating any amount you see fit, small or large, to this fund. See http://www.swfox.net/ambassador.aspx for details. 100% of donated money goes to the travel costs for the ambassador. Not a single penny is used to cover administrative costs. All time managing the fund and working through the selection process is donated. No one is paid for their time.

Southwest Fox/Xbase++ 2013 Call for Speakers

Just a reminder that session proposals for Southwest Fox 2013 and Southwest Xbase++ 2013 are due by 8 AM EDT this Friday, March 22. If you’re interested in speaking, please download the Call for Speakers and submit your proposals using our new online application at www.geekgatherings.com/submission. We look forward to hearing from you.

A Couple More Report Designer Bug Fixes

I’ve blogged a few times about minor fixes in the VFP Report Designer: Fixing a Report Designer Bug, Updating the VFPX ReportBuilder.APP, Fixing Another Report Designer Issue, and Fixing Yet Another Report Designer Issue. Here’s a couple of more fixes:

• If you look very closely at the Format page of the text box properties dialog after selecting Numeric, you may notice that the “CR if positive” checkbox doesn’t quite align with the other checkboxes in its column; it’s one pixel too far to the right as you can see in this enlarged image:

• The next image shows that in Windows Vista and higher, in which case Segoe UI is used as the font for controls, the “SET DATE format” option is cut off.

I implemented these fixes in the copy of ReportBuilder.APP (and the corresponding source code) available on VFPX. While I was at it, I also implemented Cathy Knight’s fix for the infamous “SET TALK” report output bug in ReportOutput.APP and its source code (thanks to prompting by Christof Wollenhaupt).

Call for Speakers - Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2013

We've issued the Call for Speakers for both conferences. If you are interested in presenting at either conference, please check out http://www.swfox.net/callforspeakers.aspx and consider submitting sessions via our new Web-based submission application.

Improve Your App’s UI

Kevin Ragsdale has a great series of blog posts on improving the UI of your applications, a topic near and dear to my heart as well. Highly recommended reading.

A Christmas Present

I usually try to get a small project done over the Christmas holidays. This year, I finally tackled something I’ve wanted to do for years: I’ve posted most of the session white papers and magazine articles I’ve written over the past 16 years (146 documents in all) at the Technical Papers page of my personal Web site, DougHennig.com. The list is alphabetical by title and includes an abstract and links to download the document and sample files (if there are any). Since the documents go back to 1996, some of them are likely out-of-date (I think “Windows 95 Issues for FoxPro” falls into that category), but most of them are still applicable. Note that anything presented or published in 2012 isn’t in the list yet.

Since most of the documents were originally in Microsoft Word, I automated the process of opening each one, writing the title and abstract to a table used to generate the list of articles, and saving the document as a PDF. As a result, although I spot-checked a lot of documents, there could be some glitches in formatting. Also, I sometimes presented a conference session on a topic I’d written a magazine article about, so I tried to remove duplicates as best I could. Please let me know if you find any problems or duplicates with these documents and I’ll get them fixed up.

When a Comma Isn’t

Stonefield Query has the ability to output reports to a CSV file. “CSV” is an abbreviation for “comma-separated values”, meaning there’s a comma between each value (which represents a field) in a row (which represents a record). Except when it’s supposed to be something else.

We recently had a customer in France report that when they output a report to CSV and then opened it in Microsoft Excel, numeric values didn’t come out right. I figured it was likely a regional setting, so I used the Control Panel Region and Language applet to change my setting to French (France) and voila (appropriate word choice, non?), was able to reproduce the problem. I thought perhaps the issue was that Excel didn’t like the fact that in France, a comma is used as a decimal separator, but changing a value like “45,25” to “45.25” didn’t fix the problem. Then I notice something I hadn’t noticed or heard of before: in the Customize Format dialog (click the Additional Settings button on the Formats tab of the Region and Language dialog), there’s a “list separator” setting. We in North America (and probably other places too) are used to having it be a comma, but for France, it’s a semi-colon.

Changing the CSV output to use a semi-colon instead of a comma for the separator fixed the problem. However, how to get the current value of the list separator? While VFP has functions to determine some of the user’s regional settings, such as SET(‘POINT’) (the character used for the decimal separator) and SET(‘SEPARATOR’) (the character used for the thousand separator), it doesn’t have one for this. Google turned up a few references to the Window API GetLocaleInfo function, but for some reason, that just gave me a blank rather than the expected comma or semi-colon. Fortunately, another site mentioned that it’s stored in the Windows Registry in the sList key of HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\International.

So, now you can output a CSV file from Stonefield Query and while the “C” in “CSV” may not be accurate, the file is.