Upcoming schedule

Following the cancellation of our December meeting, we now have speakers lined up for January and February. January 14, Bob Pierce will speak on a topic yet to be determined. The cancelled Menachem Bazian presentation on Php and VFP will take place on February 11.

December 10 meeting cancelled due to weather

Due to the forecast for 3-6" of snow, the December 10 meeting is cancelled. We'll reschedule Menachem's presentation.

December 10--Menachem Bazian--Web Services: How to create them and use them to share data between your web applications and Visual FoxPro

The next meeting of the Philadelphia Visual FoxPro User Group is Tuesday, December 10 at 7 PM in
room 158, DeVry University, 1140 Virginia Drive, Fort Washington, PA. As usual, feel free to bring some dinner and come as early as 6:30 PM.

Our speaker this month is Menachem Bazian.

Topic: Web Services: How to create them and use them to share data between your web applications and Visual FoxPro

Abstract: This session combines the work we have been doing on PHP with Visual FoxPro and shows you how you can easily create and use web services to easily push data down to you Visual FoxPro
applications from your web applications.

We’re looking for speakers for upcoming meetings. If you have something to share, let Jim Connolly know (JConnolly@jtca.com).

Upcoming meetings are January 14 and February 11.

November 12--Jim Connolly on West Wind Web Connection

Our next meeting will be Tuesday, November 12. Member Jim Connolly will present “Foxpro and the Internet – The West Wind Connection.” Jim will show how to set up the web server and install West Wind, set up Visual Studio for editing West Wind Pages. He will teach how to create basic web pages with connections to the FoxPro tables on a web server, show how to use grids for display on the web, and show how to move data entered via the web to the tables.

Save December 10 for another visit from Menachem Bazian.

October 8, 2013--Bill Fitzgerald on Excel Automation

Our next meeting will be next Tuesday, October 8 at 7 PM in Room 158, DeVry University, 1140 Virginia Drive, Fort Washington, PA. As usual, feel free to come as early as 6:30 and bring some dinner.

Member Bill Fitzgerald will talk about Excel automation. Bill says “Several customers have asked for outputs in Excel form of late and that wonderful resource- Microsoft Office Automation by Tamar Granor and Della Martin - is never far away when I'm doing those projects. While doing the past few projects I came across two techniques - one covered in the book but worthy of some more emphasis - and another that has surfaced since the book's publication - that  I thought would merit the group's attention.”

In addition, bring your questions about VFP for answers from the group.

Tuesday, September 10--Tamar E. Granor: "Make Thor Your Own"

Our next meeting is next Tuesday, September 10, 2013. Tamar E. Granor will speak this month, doing a Southwest Fox preview of her session “Make Thor Your Own.”

Abstract: While using Thor exactly as it's installed offers lots of benefits, Thor also can be customized in lots of ways. From adding your own tools to specifying plug-ins that change the behavior of tools to setting up options for tools, you can tailor Thor's behavior to provide yourself and your team exactly what you need. The Thor Framework and Thor Procs provide basic code that makes it easier to customize Thor.

In this session, we'll see how to take Thor to the next level by adding tools, setting up options, and modifying and adding plug-ins. We'll also explore the Thor Framework and Thor Procs to understand the rich environment Thor provides.

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.

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 more than a dozen books including the award winning Hacker's Guide to Visual FoxPro and Microsoft Office Automation with Visual FoxPro. Her most recent books are VFPX: Open Source Treasure for the VFP Developer (to be published in 2013) and Making Sense of Sedna and SP2. Her books are available from Hentzenwerke Publishing.

Tamar is one of the organizers of the annual Southwest Fox conference and founder of the Philadelphia Visual FoxPro User Group. In 2007, she received the Visual FoxPro Community Lifetime Achievement Award. She received Microsoft Support's Most Valuable Professional award
annually from the program's inception in 1993 through 2010. Tamar speaks frequently about Visual
FoxPro at conferences and user groups in North America and Europe.

You can reach her at tamar@tamargranor.com or through www.tomorrowssolutionsllc.com.

August 13--Hank Fay on Lianja, with dinner provided

Our next meeting will take place on Tuesday, August 13 at 7 PM. We’ll provide dinner for the group beginning at 6:30 PM. Please send an email to tamar@tamargranor.com if you’re coming for dinner, so we have enough.

We continue our Southwest Fox previews this month. Our speaker is Hank Fay and he’ll be presenting the instructional material from the pre-conference “Workshop on Migrating Applications to Lianja.” During the workshop, this material will be interwoven with hands-on work relevant to the instructional material, when participants will have the option to perform these actions on an app of their own choosing.

Hank Fay is President of Professional Systems Plus, Inc, (ProSysPlus) and Chief Technology Officer of DataWorks, Inc. His interest in enhancing software development through the use of metadata began in 1995, shortly after his book on "Event-driven Programming in FoxPro 2.5" was published. Together with Frank Camp, he wrote a tool integrating xCase with the Visual ProMatrix framework for VFP, along with libraries that supported and extended VPM. That toolset has delivered, and continues to deliver, enterprise applications world wide. Hank is a Lianja MVP for both 2012, when the award was initiated, and for 2013. Lianja is the toolset that meets his criteria for being able to provide a development platform for domain experts to create enterprise-class software that runs everywhere, on everything. ProSysPlus created the ERD tool integrated into Lianja.

http://vfpphilly.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, July 9--Tuvia Vinitsky on “Credit Cards and EFT/ACH in VFP”.

This month, we start a series of Southwest Fox preview sessions. Our speaker will be Tuvia Vinitsky and the topic is “Credit Cards and EFT/ACH in VFP”.

Abstract: Many applications today require the user to charge a credit card or process an ACH bank account transfer. Processing credit cards and EFT transactions in VFP involves both technical aspects and security aspects.

What is the best approach? What does PCI-compliant mean? What is the best way to connect securely to the credit card processor? What are terms like AVS and CPS? What do I have to do to keep my app current?

Software like PC-Charge and gateways like Authorize.net are essential to credit card processing. They serve different purposes, however, and knowing what services to use when can be confusing.

The requirements are very strict as to what information you can store and how it is stored. Violating these rules can result in the client losing their credt card processing priveleges.

EFT's are increasingly popular. Learn the difference between EFT and e-checks and how to process both.

Tuvia Vinitsky is a principal in Vinitsky Consulting Inc. VCI develops and markets major vertical applications for non-profit organizations and community centers (JCC, YMCA). They also provide custom software and website development.

Tuvia's Fox experience dates back to the days of FoxBase and Compuserve. He has written for FoxTalk and has been a presenter numerous times at regional users' groups. Tuvia has always enjoyed expanding the capabilities of Foxpro, whether it was graphic printer drivers in the days of DOS or Web enabling the latest VFP 9 features.

Tuvia believes in having both breadth and depth of experience. He has served as project leader for many large projects, including projects at companies like Avis-Rent-a-Car, Chicago Board of Trade, Marmon Group and Lotus.

Tuvia and his family are long time Chicago residents. He attended Northwestern University, and is an ordained Rabbi. His years at Northwestern, with its reputation for the performing arts, must have left a mark—not only is he known for his popular presentations on software development, but he frequently is a guest speaker on Jewish philosophy and teachings.

Mark your calendar now for next month’s meeting. On August 13, Hank Fay will present "Moving VFP Applications to the Cloud Using Lianja."

Mark August 13--Hank Fay on Lianja

Mark August 13 now for a Southwest Fox preview. Hank Fay (new to Southwest Fox this year) will present "Moving VFP Applications to the Cloud Using Lianja." More Southwest Fox previews to come.

June 11, 2013--Menachem Bazian: "Robust Web Application Development with PHP, CodeIgniter and MySQL”

This month, Menachem Bazian returns to continue teaching us about Php.

Abstract: This session builds on topics we have covered in the past. The session will cover in detail an application written in PHP and MySQL with features including security, menus, data entry and more. MySQL plays a large role in this solution and we will spend significant time on MySQL programming as well.

Tuesday May 14--Steve Bodnar on HTML5

Our next meeting is next Tuesday, May 14 at 7 PM. We’ll supply dinner for the group starting at 6:30 PM. If you’re planning to join us for dinner, please send an email to tamar@tamargranor.com, so we buy enough food.

Our speaker is Steve Bodnar and his topic is HTML 5.

Bio: Steve Bodnar is the President of Geeks and Gurus, Inc., a software development company with offices in Detroit, MI, Kalamazoo, MI and Colorado Springs, CO.

Steve started developing FoxPro applications with FoxPro for DOS 2.0. He actively develops VFP line of business applications as well as websites using Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC and jQuery. Steve was one of the founding members of the Detroit Area FoxPro Users Group and has attended Fox conferences as often as possible since the early 1990's.

Steve has spoken at VFP conferences and user groups in Detroit, Grand Rapids, Kansas City, Toledo, Milwaukee, Sacramento and Atlanta. He's also spoken at .NET user groups, Code Camps and conferences in Grand Rapids, Raleigh, Richmond, Roanoke, Northern Virginia, Chattanooga, Philadelphia, Knoxville and The Wisconsin Dells.

Geeks and Gurus develops line of business applications and websites for small and medium sized organizations. We deliver solutions based on Microsoft technologies such as Visual FoxPro, SQL Server and .NET.

You can learn more about Steve and Geek and Gurus at http://www.geeksandgurus.com.

Abstract: There is a lot of confusion and hype surrounding HTML5. The confusion is because the HTML5 standard isn't scheduled to reach "full recommendation status" until 2022! Yet we're seeing it in all the latest browser for both desktops and mobile devices. (Of course, they don't all implement HTML5 exactly the same as the others!) The hype comes with all the new features available to us today.

In this session, we'll take a look at the timeline and discuss what it means to us - specifically why we shouldn't wait until 2022 to start using HTML5.

We'll dive into several of the new HTML5 features and look at examples of how these things are to be implemented into our websites. We'll look at the new semantic HTML (new tags such as

and

); video and audio; Canvas; geolocation; inline elements (, , ); form input types (, , ); interactive elements (

, , etc.); offline capabilities; mobile implications and more.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013--Susan Gausch of Salesforce

Our next meeting is next Tuesday, April 9. Our speaker is Susan Gausch, Senior Solution Development Manager at SalesForce. She’ll introduce us to SalesForce:

Salesforce is an online, web-based, CRM application that runs in "the cloud" allowing users to manage and perform nearly every detail of their job. Located in San Francisco, CA, Salesforce was founded by Marc Benioff and Parker Harris in 1999. Salesforce started out as a business software company distributing its product on a subscription basis. Now it has evolved into the #1 CRM solution in the world. Salesforce is also known for the force.com platform which allows external developers to create add-on applications that integrate seamlessly with Salesforce, enabling full customization to fit any business need.

March, 2013--Bill Fitzgerald on "A VFP programmer's approach to handling data in .NET.”

Our next meeting is next Tuesday, March 12 at 7 PM in Room 158, DeVry University, 1140 Virginia Drive, Fort Washington, PA.

Member Bill Fitzgerald  is speaking this month. The topic is “A VFP programmer's approach to handling data in .NET.”

Abstract: About 6  years ago I started learning .NET and now more than 50% of my programming is done in .NET. I found some good books but most of them don't approach .NET from the point of view of a desktop database programmer and the few that do are seriously out of date.

Unlike VFP which has its own built in methods for handling data, .NET is data neutral, so countless ways of handling data have emerged and continue to emerge. It took about 4 years of trial and error before I settled on an approach to handling data within .NET desktop applications that resonated
somewhat with the way I did things with VFP. The approach is also applicable to web applications though my focus has been on the desktop.

In this session, I’ll use a small database to demonstrate my approach to handling data in .NET/SQL Server.

February 12--Tamar Granor on Thor

At our February 12 meeting, Tamar Granor will reprise her June presentation "Try Thor's Terrific Tools" with some updates based on changes to Thor.

January 8: Menachem Bazian--PHP in the Real World

Our next meeting will be next Tuesday, January 8 at 7 PM. Feel free to come as early as 6:30 for dinner. This month, we’ll be providing dinner; please email tamar@tamargranor.com if you plan to join us, so we have enough food.

Menachem Bazian returns for another look at PHP with a session titled “PHP in the Real World”: This session will discuss programming PHP in the real world. The session will follow the evolution of a simple application from original problem description through implementation. Attendees will be introduced to CodeIgniter, a low weight, high performance PHP framework which I use as the basis for my PHP applications. There will be a few other goodies thrown in for good measure too!