Monday, November 2, 2009

November 12--Menachem Bazian on Open Source Tools--NOTE SPECIAL NIGHT

Our November meeting will be held on a special night--THURSDAY, November 12--at Valley Forge Pension Management, 715 Twining Road, Suite 202, Dresher, PA 19025 at 7 PM. Come as early as 6:30 and bring dinner, if you wish.

http://vfpphilly.blogspot.com/

Menachem Bazian returns fresh from Southwest Fox to present "Open Source Tools."
Abstract: Open Source is a phenomenal resource for high quality software that can easily be integrated into your work and make your life much easier. This session shows several tools you can use to make your business and software development life a pleasure.

The session also demonstrates how some of these tools can be set up and work withiin your organization. Tools discussed include, but are not limited to:

Subversion (and TortoiseSVN)
MantisBT
SugarCRM

Bio: Menachem Bazian, CPA, CITP is President and Founder of BC Consulting Services, Inc, a Business Management and Technology Consulting Firm based in northern NJ. Menachem has been a database developer for over 20 years, having starting out with Dbase II and moved on to Dbase III, Clipper, Foxbase and all the versions of Visual FoxPro to date. He returned to the Fox speaking circuit last year including Southwest Fox 2008. He has published numerous articles and books over the years.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

September meeting--Toni Feltman and pizza

Our summer of Southwest Fox previews continues on Tuesday, September 8 as Toni Feltman practices her pre-conference session "Introduction to Subversion and Tortoise SVN." Because this is a 3-hour session at the conference, we'll begin at 6:30 PM.

We will be providing a pizza dinner at this meeting; we'll eat while Toni talks. The doors will open at 6:15; we'll try to have the pizza ready then. If you plan to attend and eat, please send an email to tamar@thegranors.com, so we get enough.

Abstract: Version control is a must for any application development platform yet many development shops still do not use a version control system. There are all sorts of excuses such as time, money or lack of team support. Once you adopt a version control system, your team will wonder how you ever lived without one. In this session, we take an in-depth, action packed look at using Subversion and Tortoise as a version control repository for FoxPro applications. Most FoxPro developers are cost conscious so how much better can you get than a FREE version control system. Subversion and Tortoise are both free tools that despite the price, work great.

Bio: Toni Feltman, a Microsoft Certified Professional, is an experienced software developer, project manager, instructor and speaker. She is Vice President and a Partner at F1 Technologies and is still an integral part of the company. During her 16 years at F1 Technologies she has served as both a developer and project manager on numerous projects and as Product Manager for the highly successful FoxExpress product line.

Toni is a well known contributor to the Visual FoxPro development community. She has spoken at most major FoxPro conferences in North America and Europe. Although Toni has expertise in a number of areas, she generally focuses her presentations on Team Development, XML, n-Tier Development and new features in Visual FoxPro.

Toni has penned several articles for Advisor Guide to Microsoft Visual FoxPro and is co-author of Making Sense of Sedna and SP2 and What's New in Visual FoxPro 9.0 (Hentzenwerke Publishing). Toni also designed and developed Project HookX, a VFPX utility designed to allow developers to manage and use multiple project hooks on a single Visual FoxPro Project. Toni is one of several co-authors of DBCX, a public domain data dictionary tool used or supported by many notable Visual FoxPro products including the Stonefield Data Dictionary, Visual FoxExpress, FoxFire! and Stonefield Query.

Toni taught for several years at the University of Toledo on a wide variety of technologies including Microsoft Office applications, XML, various Internet development technologies and database design and programming. Toni also enjoyed a stint as an instructor for AppDev.

Toni's introduction to the FoxPro community came while she worked in the technical support department at Fox Software. Toni was a senior level support technician and Sysop of the Fox Software Forum on CompuServe.

Toni graduated from Bowling Green State University in 1989 with a BA in Management Information Systems.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

August 11--Tamar Granor: Top 10 (or more) Reasons to Use the Toolbox

The Southwest Fox rehearsals continue at our next meeting on Tuesday, August 11. As usual, feel free to bring dinner and come as early as 6:30.

Tamar E. Granor will present "Top Ten (or more) Reasons to Use the Toolbox":

The VFP Toolbox is a terrific tool, but many VFP developers have never really used it. In this session, we'll look at why you should use this tool everyday. We will look at built-in capabilities like an easy way to drop controls into grid columns. We'll also see how to customize it for your development environment, including having each control you drop given an appropriate name. Finally, we'll explore some easy extensions that make the Toolbox even more useful, such as making it easy to store web links.

Tamar E. Granor, Ph.D., is the owner of Tomorrow's Solutions, LLC. She has developed and enhanced numerous Visual FoxPro applications for businesses and other organizations. She currently focuses on working with other developers through consulting and subcontracting.

Tamar served as Editor of FoxPro Advisor magazine from 1994 to 2000 and was Technical Editor from 2000 to 2008. She served as co-author of the popular Advisor Answers column from 1993 to 2008. She has also written for FoxTalk and CoDe; she currently writes for FoxRockX.

Tamar is author or co-author of ten books including the award winning Hacker's Guide to Visual FoxPro and Microsoft Office Automation with Visual FoxPro. Her most recent books are Making Sense of Sedna and SP2 and Taming Visual FoxPro's SQL. Her books are available from Hentzenwerke Publishing (www.hentzenwerke.com).

In 2007, Tamar received the Visual FoxPro Community Lifetime Achievement Award. She has received Microsoft Support's Most Valuable Professional award annually since the program's inception in 1993. Tamar speaks frequently about Visual FoxPro at conferences and user groups in North America and Europe.
You can reach her at tamar@thegranors.com or through www.tomorrowssolutionsllc.com.


Also, mark your calendar for Tuesday, September 8, when Toni Feltman will present "Introduction to Subversion and Tortoise SVN."

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

July 14: Menachem Bazian presents "SQL in Many Forms"

Let the Southwest Fox rehearsals begin.

The next meeting of the Philadelphia VFP User Group is Tuesday, July 14 at 7 PM at Valley Forge Pension Management, 715 Twining Road, Suite 202, Dresher, PA 19025. There is a $5 fee for the meeting.

Our speaker will be Menachem Bazian, CPA, CITP and President and Founder of BC Consulting Services, Inc, a Business Management and Technology Consulting Firm based in northern NJ. Menachem has been a database developer for over 20 years, having starting out with Dbase II and moved on to Dbase III, Clipper, Foxbase and all the versions of Visual FoxPro to date. He returned to the Fox speaking circuit last year including Southwest Fox 2008. He has published numerous articles and books over the years.

He'll present a preview of his Southwest Fox session "SQL in Many Forms": SQL is the lingua franca of data. Introduced into FoxPro way back in 2.0, VFP developers have been using it in applications for years. With the growing popularity of using Client Server back ends, it is necessary to know the differences between the various favors of SQL you will encounter. The session concentrates on VFP, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server flavors of SQL.

Mark your calendars for two more Southwest Fox rehearsals:

August 11--Tamar Granor presents "Top 10 (or more) reasons to use the Toolbox."

September 8--Toni Feltman presents "Introduction to Subversion and Tortoise SVN."

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Another exciting summer of Southwest Fox previews

Thanks to Southwest Fox, our summer schedule is full with exciting speakers. Menachem Bazian will visit in July, Toni Feltman will join us in September, and I'll fill the August meeting. Each of us will be previewing material for Southwest Fox. Session details to come soon.

June--Bob Pierce on VFP and the Internet

The Philadelphia VFP User Group will meet next Tuesday, June 9 at 7 PM at Valley Forge Pension Management, 715 Twining Road, Suite 202, Dresher, PA 19025. As usual, feel free to bring dinner and come as early as 6:30.

Bob Pierce will speak this month. His topic is "Nothing but Net": Visual FoxPro can be a great tool for interacting with the Internet. This session will include many different ways to use VFP to send emails, download content, send files using FTP, publishing content, and run a VFP web server. All of the techniques use freely available tools that can easily be integrated into your applications with a minimum of effort.

Those present will be eligible to win a 1-year MSDN Premium subscription, including Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite. (The subscription must be activated by 6/30/2009.)

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

May meeting--Jerry Noble or search and bar code scanning

The Philadelphia VFP user group will meet next Tuesday, May 12, at 7 PM at Valley Forge Pension Management, 715 Twining Road, Suite 202, Dresher, PA 19025. As usual, feel free to bring some dinner and come as early as 6:30.

Member Jerry Noble will demonstrate his search engine which sequentially searches for customers on 10 different criteria using class code which allows for the use of navigation keys and auto-capitalization. He will also show how he uses a Bar Code Scanner to search for and populate the application with the information found on the Vehicle Registration Card.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

April 14 meeting--Craig Benson and more

Our April headliner is Craig Benson from TIW. He'll present two short topics.

Embedded Hyperlinks

Embedded File Hyperlinks provide a simple method from within a VFP application to access all types of files including Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and CAD drawings. An easy approach will be demonstrated for enabling the user to add these links to any existing application. This capability has been a real crowd pleaser with our customers.

Screen Modification Tool

The ALERE products include a screen modification tool that allows our users to change the layout and properties of objects on any form in real time. This feature provides form modification capabilities with a presentation consistent with the VFP Form Designer. This tool supports the dragging and dropping of objects and the changing of properties on a custom property sheet. The capabilities, design and underlying structure will be presented and examined.


In addition, Bill Fitzgerald will present a brief demo of the WAV player foundation class.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

March 10: More member presentations

The Philadelphia VFP User Group will meet Tuesday, March 10 at 7 PM.Feel free to bring dinner and arrive as early as 6:30.

Several members will contribute to this month's meeting. Tim Saylor will present a calendar control and several other items. Tamar Granor will show the Control Renamer builder, which she recently contributed to VFPX. If time permits, Bob Pierce will follow up on the search utility he showed last month and show a GDI+ tool for rotating graphics.

Friday, February 6, 2009

February 10 meeting--A potpourri of useful techniques

We'll meet Tuesday, February 10 at 7 PM. As usual, come as early as 6:30 and bring dinner, if you want.

Two members will present this month.

Alen Kalati will show two things:

First, a customizable toolbar. Alen explains: My application starts with a number of empty toolbar buttons which the user can then choose what they would do. The selection is done simply by right clicking the toolbar button while a form is open, which then it assigns it its 'click' method.

Second, a simple way of associating photos with inventory items using a bar code scanner. Again, a simple but very effective trick of doing this, which since has really revolutionized the way photos are associated with rugs in the rug industry.

Bob Pierce will talk about searching within a grid, integrating with filtering and sorting options.

We anticipate some time for open mike or questions at the end of the meeting, so if you have a little something to share, come prepared to do so.

Friday, January 9, 2009

January Meeting--two members present

We'll start off the new year with presentations by two of our members on Tuesday, January 13 at 7 PM.

First Bill Fitzgerald will introduce us to another VFPX tool, FoxCharts. Then Craig Benson will talk about "Subclassing - a simple way to create a customizable and patchable application." Here's his abstract:

VFP allows applications to be created with layers of hierarchy. These layers can be used to turn product customization and code patching into managable tasks. This session will show how to use these layers to make custom versions of an application using the VFP screen designer, add features to an application and create patches for distribution without redistribution the entire application.