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.