Monday, July 28, 2008

Menachem Bazian to return August 12!

This summer has been an amazing one for our group. In June, we had a visit from Marcia Akins, who showed us to how to put the Windows API to work. In July, Cathy Pountney demonstrated a clever scheme for maintaining a single code base for a vertical market application, yet allowing customization for individual clients.

We've just confirmed that Menachem Bazian will return for our August 12th meeting. He'll talk about setting up a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Python) server. Although this is a sequel to his February topic, those who missed that meeting should have no trouble following along.

Note that August is the first month for our new meeting night, the second Tuesday of the month. While you're putting this meeting on your calendar, also mark September 9th. I'll be speaking that night, rehearsing my new session, "We Used to Do it That Way, But ..." for Southwest Fox.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

July meeting--Cathy Pountney on Customizing Vertical Market Apps

Out group's exciting summer continues next Wednesday, July 16, with a visit from Cathy Pountney to present "Customizing Your Vertical Market Application." As usual, dinner begins at 6:30 with the meeting at 7 PM. Once again this month, we'll provide dinner for the group; please send an email to tamar@tamargranor.com if you're planning to come for dinner, so we get enough.

The meeting location is Valley Forge Pension Management, 715 Twining Road, Suite 202, Dresher, PA 19025. Note that the Oreland offramp from PA 309 Southbound has been permanently closed. The easiest way to reach the meeting location from the PA Turnpike or 309 Southbound is to come through the Fort Washington Industrial Park.

Cathy Pountney is a five-time recipient of the Microsoft VFP MVP award and has been developing software for 26 years, many of which were as an independent consultant specializing in FoxPro. In 2001 she had the privilege of spending six months as a contractor onsite in Redmond with the Microsoft Fox Team. She now works for Memorial Business Systems writing software for the cemetery and funeral home industry. Cathy has spoken at many FoxPro conferences and user groups across the U.S. and Canada, written articles for various magazines, and her book, The Visual FoxPro Report Writer: Pushing it to the Limit and Beyond, is available from Hentzenwerke Publishing. You can contact Cathy at cathy@frontier2000.com, view her website at http://www.frontier2000.com, and view MBS’s website at www.mbs-intl.com.

Customizing Your Vertical Market App:

Writing a vertical market application can be very rewarding. You write one application, sell it numerous times, and sit back while the money rolls in. Well, that’s the theory anyway. The reality is that often times, new clients want to buy your software, as long as you can change this one little thing. Managing custom code for various clients within your application can easily turn into a nightmare as your client base expands. This session shows you how to implement a customization methodology in your vertical market application that keeps your standard code independent from your custom code, yet have the two code bases play nice together.