Tuesday, December 7, 2010

December 14--Short presentations plus MSDN giveaway

Our December meeting features a few short presentations. Bill Fitzgerald will talk about SQL Stored procedures with .NET. Bob Pierce will present "Sidebars, add customizable convenience for your users."

Here's Bob's abstract: A customizable sidebar is a great way to give your users quick access to information and functionality to increase productivity. I will show some of the benefits of a sidebar as well as the technique I used to create a production sidebar using VFP. I will then discuss some of the things I learned and would do different if I were to build a sidebar from scratch today.

Depending on time, we may have one more short take.

We will be raffling off a one-year Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN subscription, with a retail value of nearly $12,000. (Note: it must be activated by the end of the year.) All those present will be eligible to win. We have some nice giveaway items from Microsoft as well.

We're looking for presenters for 2011. Please get in touch with Bob Pierce (rpierce@smooth-on.com) if you have something to share with the group.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

November, 2010--Tamar Granor on Office Automation

Our next meeting will take place Tuesday evening, November 9 at 7 PM. As usual, feel free to come as early at 6:30 and bring dinner.

This month, Tamar E. Granor will present her Southwest Fox session "Office Automation Tips, Tricks and Traps":

Once you get started automating Microsoft Office, you're likely to find more and more uses for Automation. But you also start running into peculiarities of the individual servers, file format issues, and other complications. In this session, we'll look at a number of issues related to automating the Office servers, including exploring why recording a macro can lead you astray. Most of the topics will apply to multiple Office servers, but we'll also look at the so-called Outlook "hell patch" and how you can automate Outlook email with a minimum of fuss.

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.

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 and is one of the organizers of the annual Southwest Fox conference.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

MONDAY, October 11--Christof Wollenhaupt on "How the Fox is Different"

Come out on a special night for a special treat as VFP guru Christof Wollenhaupt visits our group. The meeting will take place MONDAY, October 11 at 7 PM.

As usual, we'll start with dinner at 6:30 PM. We'll provide dinner for this meeting, so please let Bob Pierce (rpierce@smooth-on.com) know if you plan to join us, so we have enough food.

Christof will preview his Southwest Fox session "How the Fox is Different":

You always knew that FoxPro is different from every other programming language! You had a pretty clear idea that the development environment of Visual FoxPro is far superior to the one found in .NET, Java, and PHP. How else is it possible that those languages exists for years or even more than a decade and still lack features that FoxPro sported for eons? Even the simplest task in any of these languages requires an incredible amount of time. It's certainly not surprising that every single .NET project takes a multitude of time of a comparable VFP project to complete.

Ever thought along these lines? Then this session might have a few surprises for you. There will be a few insights in how FoxPro and other languages (primarily .NET) differ. We will see how even minor differences in the languages lead to vastly different application designs. It shouldn't come as surprise that many techniques published in books are aimed at C++, .NET and Java developers. Those techniques are good for those languages, but often a sub-optimal choice for VFP. Nonetheless, they were adopted by the VFP community and naturally failed to deliver the promised value.

If you have years of experience with Visual FoxPro, this session will support you in using .NET more efficiently. Yet, at the same time, it should made clear that "knowing OOP" is by far not enough to master .NET. Becoming proficient in .NET isn't the matter of learning a language; it's a matter of learning an idiom.

If you are one of the poor souls that started as a .NET or Java developer and have been forced to work on a VFP project, you'll learn that VFP isn't as awful as you first thought; just very different.


Christof Wollenhaupt specializes in FoxPro and .NET development and consulting. Having worked with FoxPro for more than 18 years he now has made every thinkable error in FoxPro personally. Customers around the world rely on his experience to learn from these mistakes. Christof is an international speaker at user group meetings and conferences and the organiser of the Hamburger Stammtisch für Datenbankentwickler, a monthly meeting for Microsoft database developers. Despite spending his time writing way over a hundred articles for various magazines, he was awarded the Microsoft MVP award every year since 1997. Christof authored the Guineu product family, a development environment that moves FoxPro forward to other platforms. For more information please visit http://www.foxpert.com and http://www.guineu.net.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Durban on the Web Browser Control -- Tuesday, September 14

Next Tuesday, September 14, Bo Durban visits to present "Extending VFP Using the Web Browser Control." If time permits, he'll also give us a peak at his second Southwest Fox Session "Using Direct2D with Visual FoxPro."

The meeting begins at 7 PM. As always, you're welcome to come starting at 6:30 PM for dinner. This month, the group will provide dinner. Please RSVP to tamar@tamargranor.com if you plan to eat the food provided, so we get enough.

Bo Durban is the founder and primary consultant of Moxie Data, Inc. He has been a software developer for over 20 years with an emphasis on reporting and Web development. He is the author of several reporting utilities including Moxie Report Objects for Visual FoxPro.

Bo is the project manager for the GDIPlusX project and the VFP9 Reporting APPs, located on VFPX, a community effort to create open source add-ons for Visual FoxPro 9.0. He has spoken at software developer conferences around the world as well as User Group meetings. Bo also has written technical articles for software development publications such as CoDe and FoxTalk.

Abstract: Enhancing the user experience has become a necessity for new development. Users are demanding easier ways to navigate and view their data. There is a figurative "world" of GUI elements and libraries out there for enhancing the user experience via the web browser. Why not incorporate some of these into your Windows form applications using the Web Browser control? This session will show you how you can significantly enhance the look and feel of your application by creating custom controls based on the Web Browser control. Learn how to seamlessly display data, accept user input, and respond to events and how to hook into a world of cool visual libraries and services using the Web Browser control. Practical examples will demonstrate the benefits the Web Browser control can offer.

Be sure to mark your calendars for MONDAY, October 11 for a special visit from Christof Wollenhaupt as he makes his way to Arizona for Southwest Fox. he'll present "How the Fox is Different."

Monday, August 2, 2010

Southwest Fox Previews to come--Durban and Wollenhaupt

We're excited to present two Southwest Fox previews in the upcoming months, featuring two well-known speakers.

Tuesday, September 14, Bo Durban will present "Extending VFP using the Web Browser Control" and, if time permits, give us a peek at his other session "Using Direct2D with Visual FoxPro."

On MONDAY, October 11 (note the special night), Christof Wollenhaupt will present "How the Fox is Different."

For details on the sessions, check http://swfox.net/sessions.aspx.

No August, 2010 meeting

We're taking August off this year. Enjoy the heat.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

July meeting--Tamar Granor on "Collections-Managing Information the Object-Oriented Way"

Our next meeting will take place on Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 7 PM. We now meet at Valley Forge Pension Management, 550 Township Line Road, Suite 300, Blue Bell, PA 19422. As always, feel free to come as early at 6:30 and bring dinner.

This month, we begin Southwest Fox previews with Tamar E. Granor speaking on "Collections--Managing Information the Object-Oriented Way."

Abstract: When the collection base class was added to VFP 8, it gave us the opportunity to make our applications look more like those in other object-oriented languages. Collections let us manage groups of related objects through a straightforward interface, and avoid the peculiarities of working with arrays in VFP.

In this session, we'll cover the basics of using collections, the reasons why they're better than arrays, and show how they improve object models. We'll also consider the weaknesses of collections in VFP and talk about workarounds.

Bio: 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.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

June meeting--Advantage Database Server

Our next meeting will take place next Tuesday, June 8, at 7 PM at our new location: Valley Forge Pension Management, 550 Township Line Road, Suite 300, Blue Bell, PA 19422. As usual, you're welcome to arrive as early as 6:30 PM and bring dinner with you.

Our speakers this month are Chris Franz and Jay Wendt of Sybase. They'll introduce Advantage Database Server:

You already know that Visual FoxPro is one of the best tools available for application development, but did you know that Advantage Database Server has better support for Visual FoxPro than any other database engine? Join us as we take you on a tour through the product. We'll introduce you to Sybase and how Advantage fits into the big picture. Then, we'll move on to the technical aspect of the server and why it's different than any other database engine. You'll see getting started tips and demos to view first hand and just how easy it is for FoxPro developers to move to client/server with Advantage. We'll even provide development versions of the software for attendees.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

New location starting with June meeting

We're pleased to announce that, as of the June, 2010 meeting, we'll move into our new location. Thanks to Valley Forge Pension Management, who have been our hosts in Dresher for several years, for allowing us to use their new facilities in Blue Bell. The new location is:

550 Township Line Road
Suite 300
Blue Bell, PA 19422

This is just a few minutes from where the PA Turnpike, Blue Route and Northeast Extension meet in Plymouth Meeting, providing easy access whether you're coming from North, South, East or West.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

May meeting--Doug Hennig (live from Saskatchewan) on GDIPlusX

Our next meeting will take place Tuesday, May 11 at 7:00 PM. For one more month, we'll meet at Granor-Price Office Center, 721 Dresher Road, Horsham, PA. As usual, feel free to come as early as 6:30 and bring some dinner.

We're trying something new for this month's meeting. Doug Hennig will present a session remotely. That is, he'll be in Sasksatchewan and thanks to the Internet, be able to give us a live presentation.

Introduction to GDIPlusX

GDIPlusX is a VFPX project that exposes GDI+ to VFP applications as a set of VFP class libraries. GDIPlusX makes it easy to add new graphical abilities to your applications, allowing you to provide a fresher and more powerful user interface. This session provides an introduction to GDIPlusX, going through the basics of GDI+, looking at the classes in GDIPlusX, and going through various samples of how to use GDIPlusX in VFP applications.

Doug Hennig is a partner with Stonefield Systems Group Inc. and Stonefield Software Inc. He is the author of the award-winning Stonefield Database Toolkit (SDT); the award-winning Stonefield Query; the MemberData Editor, Anchor Editor, and CursorAdapter and DataEnvironment builders that come with Microsoft Visual FoxPro; and the My namespace and updated Upsizing Wizard in Sedna.

Doug is co-author of Making Sense of Sedna and SP2, Visual FoxPro Best Practices For The Next Ten Years, the What's New in Visual FoxPro series (the latest being What's New in Nine), and The Hacker's Guide to Visual FoxPro 7.0. He was the technical editor of The Hacker's Guide to Visual FoxPro 6.0 and The Fundamentals. All of these books are from Hentzenwerke Publishing (http://www.hentzenwerke.com). Doug wrote over 100 articles in 10 years for FoxTalk and has written numerous articles in FoxPro Advisor, Advisor Guide to Visual FoxPro, and CoDe. He currently writes for FoxRockX (http://www.foxrockx.com).

He spoke at every Microsoft FoxPro Developers Conference (DevCon) starting in 1997 and at user groups and developer conferences all over the world. He is one of the organizers of the annual Southwest Fox conference. He is one of the administrators for the VFPX VFP community extensions Web site (http://vfpx.codeplex.com). He has been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 1996. Doug was awarded the 2006 FoxPro Community Lifetime Achievement Award (http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~FoxProCommunityLifetimeAchievementAward~VFP).

Web: http://www.stonefield.com and http://www.stonefieldquery.com
Blog: http://doughennig.blogspot.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/DougHennig


Mark your calendar for June 8, when we'll get a Mike Hagman from Sybase will present Advantage Database Server.

Monday, April 5, 2010

April 13--Chick Bornheim on FoxFire!

We will meet next Tuesday, April 13, at 7 PM. Our speaker will be Chick Bornheim, the President and Founder of Micromega Systems, makers of FoxFire! Report Writer. The meeting will be held at the Granor Price Office Center, 721 Dresher Road, Horsham, PA 19044.

The group will provide dinner for this meeting (including homemade pastrami) beginning at 6:30 PM. Please let Tamar Granor (tamar@tamargranor.com) know if you plan to attend, so we have enough food.

Chick Bornheim has spent over 30 years in various app-dev roles including user liason, designer, developer, program manager, marketing, licensing, and executive management. He is a principal member of the Foxfire! design team and two other vertical products, founder of two successful businesses and has advised or assisted in the many other startups.

Foxfire! Report Writer v8+ comprises a family of data mining tools designed for regular business users. Developers can:
* adapt it to almost any FoxPro or ODBC compatible database
* immediately add any features required to create a glove-fit solution to the end user's needs.

Foxfire! is the only set of report writers for the vfp environment that can operate interchangeably on both platforms. Its interactive drag-'n-drop design tools has been praised by usability experts and end users alike for simplicity without sacrificing power.

Micromega Systems offers Foxfire! consulting, integration, and training services. Our growth strategy is partnering, and we are currently seeking other developers who want to partner to create custom or localized versions to address special market opportunities. Go to www.foxfirereporting.com to explore how we might work together.

Andrew MacNeill will join Chick by teleconference to demonstrate how east it is for developers adapt Foxfire! to simplify the user's experience of reporting with a custom database, and how simple it is to port the Windows version to the Foxfire! Web Report Writer.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Advantage Database Server moved to June

The presentation on the Advantage Database Server, which had been scheduled for May 11, has been moved to June 8, to accommodate Mike Hagman from Sybase, who'll give the presentation.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

March meeting--Open Mike! Bring a command!

The next meeting of the Philadelphia VFP User Group will take place on Tuesday, March 9 at 7:00 PM. For March and April only, we will meet at the Granor Price Office Center, 721 Dresher Road, Horsham, PA. This is just a few minutes from the Willow Grove interchange of the PA Turnpike and is not far from the Virginia Drive slip ramp. Either one is a good choice.

As usual, if you want, bring dinner and arrive as early at 6:30.

We'll pick up last month's cancelled "Open Mike Night." Bring one command or function that you find really useful, but think is not widely used. It could even be a particular way of using a command or function. If you can demo whatever it is from the Command Window, you don't need to bring a laptop; we'll have one available.

Also, feel free to come with a short demo or a question for the group.

One correction from last month's notice. The Advantage Database Server presentation will be on May 11 (not April, as I mistakenly said last month). We're looking for topics for the April meeting. If you have something to present, let Bob Pierce (rpierce@smooth-on.com) know.

Monday, February 8, 2010

February 9 meeting cancelled due to impending snow

Given a forecast for snow to begin Tuesday afternoon, and for quite a bit of snow to fall, we are cancelling this month's meeting. Mark your calendars for Tuesday, March 9 and, if you have something to share with the group, let Bob Pierce know (rpierce@smooth-on.com).

Tamar

Thursday, February 4, 2010

February 9 - Open Mike night! Bring a command

Our next meeting will take place on February 9 at 7 PM. As usual, feel free to bring dinner and to arrive as early as 6:30 PM.

This month, we'll have an Open Mike night. To kick things off, we ask everyone who's coming to "bring" one command or function that you find really useful, but think is not widely used. It could even be a particular way of using a command or function. If you can demo whatever it is from the Command Window, you don't need to bring a laptop; we'll have one available.

Also, feel free to come with a short demo or a question for the group.

Note that we will be changing our meeting location soon. More info to come as soon as we have the details ironed out.

Also, mark your calendar now for upcoming meetings:

March 9 -- speaker needed
April 13 -- Advantage Database Server

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

January 12--Tamar Granor on Business Objects

Our next meeting will take place Tuesday, January 12, 2010. As usual, feel free to bring dinner and arrive as early as 6:30.

Tamar E. Granor will present "Getting Your Head Around Business Objects," previously seen at Southwest Fox 2009.

Abstract: For many years, we've heard that business objects are important, but most of the examples are tied too tightly to the user interface to really make the point. In this session, we use a highly graphical example to show how business objects can really improve your applications. We see how a well-designed set of business objects makes changing an application's behavior easier and keeps your application's functionality separate from its user interface.

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.