From the community

Martin Salias, Southworks   Martin Salias (Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a Developer and Architect at Southworks, providing services for Microsoft Corp and other corporate customers in the Americas and Europe. He has more than 25 years in the software industry working with several different platforms and languages. He is a member of the Agile Alliance and a Microsoft MVP (C#).

Universal Thread Magazine team
Editor in Chief Martín Salías Co-Editor Michel Fournier Lead Translator Rodolfo Duarte Translators Cleber Ferrari Dioblán Rufín Fábio Vazquez Moacyr Zalcman Antonio Castaño Fabián Belo Rafael Copquin César Faux Hilmar Zonneveld Pablo Pioli José L. Santana Blasco Fernando Borges Frederico Tomazetti Erick Miranda Roverson Estevam Welington Lourenço
In this issue
Writers Michel Fournier Terry Thurber Hilmar Zonneveld Éric Moreau Oscar Zárate Fabio Galuppo José L. Santana Blasco Dan Jurden Contributors Cathi Gero Wayne Myers Vlad Grynchyshyn Reviewers Guy Barrette

This month, we resume some of the upcoming conferences and we talk about the User Group Meeting Tracker, the .NET Zone and about the Visual FoxPro Community Survey 2003.

Upcoming conferences

This year, spring season includes many great international events for developers. The next conference about Visual FoxPro specific material is Essential Fox. It will be held in Kansas City, MO from April 25-28. Then, a few weeks later, DevTeach makes its debut in Montreal. DevTeach covers .NET, SQL Server and Visual FoxPro topics. It will be held on May 10-13. Then, are two more specific Visual FoxPro conferences. Another DevCon will be held in Palm Springs, CA from June 15-18. Praha 2003 will be given the week after in Prague, Czech Republic from June 24-25. Those are great events that provide great training material from industry leading experts. If you cannot attend one of them, be sure to keep in touch from our official coverages.

User Group Meeting Tracker

The User Group Meeting Tracker contains new features that we released in the last month. One interesting one is the ability for a member to subscribe to specific user groups. This allows someone to receive by email the release of any user group announcements and news for the related user group(s). This is a great way to keep in touch about your local user group activities. More and more user group leaders are relying on the Universal Thread for the broadcast of their announcements and this new feature is a great one to use about it.

It is now simpler than ever. All is required to subscribe is a simple click when reading a user group meeting or a user group news. When reading it, near the bottom, is a section called "List of subscribers". Additionally to provide the ability to subscribe or unsubscribe, you can view the list of subscribers for that specific user group. This is practically very useful for user group leaders.

Many requests about this site were about the ability to track the history of speakers' presentations as well as monitoring for potential speakers. The new Track Speakers option allows you to get the list of all registered speakers in the site with their presentation history. So, it's a great way to see and look for potential speakers for your user group meetings. You can also use it to see if a speaker is within your area for a specific date or if that speaker is already speaking elsewhere during the timeframe you would like to have him/her onboard for your user group meeting.

Another addition is the ability for a user group to rely on the User Group Meeting Tracker for their site. The Vancouver FoxPro User Group is the first one to benefit of this feature. This service provides a static link to the user group entry as well as all actual benefits such as the user group info, the contact, the archive of meetings and the list of subscribers.

.NET Zone

The .NET Zone has also benefited of new enhancements over the last month. We have started to include the lists of who's going to specific .NET events. A great addition is the Guy Barrette's Books reviews which summarizes all book reviews Guy has done over the last year about .NET. We also added quick links to get immediate access to .NET user group meetings, user group news and user groups into the User Group Meeting Tracker.

Visual FoxPro Community Survey 2003

The result of our Visual FoxPro Community Survey 2003 is released. Again this year, many members have participated in it. Many thanks to all who participated and congratulations to our winner, Randy Bosma, who won a one-year PUTM, a one-year Universal Thread Magazine subscription and a copy of EPS Software Corporation's VooDoo. This survey has allowed us to gather important information about Visual FoxPro developers which is useful for us, Microsoft and for the community in general.