November 13: Leveraging your product's website to expedite product development and stability

Our next meeting is Tuesday, November 13. Scott P. Malinowski will present “Leveraging your product's website to expedite product development and stability.”

Scott works for NEMRC (New England Municipal Resource Center). He has been a VFP Developer for 26 years from FoxPro Base upward, with some Quicksilver and Xbase 3.

Abstract: Most vertical market applications have a corresponding website to market the sales of their application.  The purpose of this session is to show you how easy it can be to use the same website to serve updates, collect and report error information, collect and report other system information, validate active clients and keep your customer databases up to date with current information.  The session will show the use five technologies, Visual FoxPro, HTML, perl and FTP and Windows Scheduled Tasks.

WEDNESDAY Sept 12: Tamar Granor on Drag and Drop

Our next meeting is Wednesday, September 12. (Note the special meeting night, due to Rosh Hashanah.) 

Tamar Granor will do a Southwest Fox preview with her session “Drag Your Applications into the 21st Century with Drag-and-Drop.”

Abstract: Users today expect to be able to interact with applications by dragging and dropping. FoxPro has offered drag-and-drop capability since VFP 3, but many developers have never worked with it. In fact, VFP offers two separate approaches for drag-and-drop, a native capability and OLE drag-and-drop, which allows you to interact with other applications and gives you greater control over the process. In this session, we'll look at both approaches and show both how easy simple drag-and-drop is, and the complex things you can accomplish with it.

Also, be aware that registration is still open for the Southwest Fox conference October 18-21 in Gilbert, AZ. Check out the speakers and topics.

 

Tuesday, July 10: Menachem Bazian on “Harnessing the power of WordPress”

Our next meeting is Tuesday, July 10. The meeting will begin at 7 PM, but bring some dinner and come as early as 6:30 PM. If you arrive at Smooth-On and there’s no one to let you in, call Bob Pierce at (610) 865-6910.

Menachem Bazian returns to teach us about “Harnessing the power of WordPress.”

Abstract: WordPress is the most popular CMS on the market today. Using WordPress, you can create robust websites with relative ease. But, like everything, using WordPress has its costs as well. This session will discuss how to use WordPress, some of the must have plugins for your site and how to write your own plugin so you can show data from your Visual FoxPro application on the site.

May 8, 2018: Bob Pierce on Interface Design elements

Our next meeting is next Tuesday, May 8. Member Bob Pierce will present. 

Here’s Bob’s description of the session: I will be showing many examples of interface design elements that are included in Smooth-On’s ERP/MRP.  These examples, made entirely in VFP, will show a number of approaches that were used to solve diverse problems, and a brief glimpse of how they were put together.  If time permits I can also show a couple of Tricks & Tips that I use on a regular basis.

March 13, 2018: Tamar E. Granor: "You Mean I Have to Write About It, Too?"

We’ll start meeting again next Tuesday, March 13 (and then meet on the second Tuesday of May, July, September and November). As usual, the meeting will begin at 7 PM, but bring some dinner and come as early as 6:30 PM. 

Group member and author Tamar E. Granor will present a workshop titled “You Mean I Have to Write About It, Too?”

Abstract: Many software developers would prefer never to have to write in a natural language; they're much happier with programming languages. But the ability to communicate in writing is actually an essential skill for successful software development. Developers need to be able to write specifications and developer documentation, as well as to clearly ask questions of their customers and to answer customer questions. In some cases, developers are responsible for end-user documentation, too.

In this session, we'll see how to produce documents that say what you need to say in an accessible way, whether you're writing a user manual or an email. We'll look at all stages of the writing process, from organization to writing to editing to proofing. Come prepared to write and edit both your own and that of a peer. Please bring something on which to write and something to write with.

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.

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 and Making Sense of Sedna and SP2.

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 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.

If you have something to present to the group, please contact Jim Connolly, jconnolly@jtca.com.