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German VFP DevCon 2009

German VFP DevCon 2009

German VFP DevCon 2009

German VFP DevCon 2009

German VFP DevCon 2009

German VFP DevCon 2009

German VFP DevCon 2009

German VFP DevCon 2009

German VFP DevCon 2009

German VFP DevCon 2009

German VFP DevCon 2009

German VFP DevCon 2009

• Thursday, November 12
• Friday, November 13
• Saturday, November 14

Thursday, November 12

by Jan Vít

Hello again!

It is November in Frankfurt. The traditional time and place for another year of the German Visual FoxPro and SQL-Server & .NET developer conference. The UT reporting is present and I am here again to bring you the latest, right from the very hands of the developers’ community.

I managed to arrive one day earlier to settle down nicely and as the last evening before the conference is closing by now, I am starting to feel the atmosphere around me. Just as captains on their ships at the eves of all battles, all the speakers and many of the attendees are already roaming around the Lindner Congress Hotel hallways.

Just as every year, there are many proven German speakers as well as foreign ones, bringing the news from abroad. Among the well known foreign speakers who accepted the invitation for this year are Ken Levy, taking the Keynote again, Doug Henning, Craig Berntson, Kevin McNeish and Rick Schummer. We also have a new speaker from Holland, Boudewijn Lutgerink, a nice guy I have already had a chance to meet at the conference in Prague earlier this year.

Again, we have full three days of sessions. They start in the morning and continue to the evening in the form of late night sessions. As usual, there is a plenty of choice available as there are always four sessions running in parallel.

The event is just about to start. Stay tuned!

Welcome Session – Rainer Becker

After the breakfast, everyone gathered in the Auditorium for the Welcome Session, where Reiner Becker, the organizer of the conference is to give his opening words.

The first change that had stroked me right when I entered the room was the fact that there were not only chairs as usual, but also comfortable tables with power plugs to have your laptop on for instance. For me as a reporter this is a very welcome change. When I looked around though most attendees also were taking their notes and the table made it just much more comfortable.

At the beginning Rainer welcomed everyone on the already 16. Visual FoxPro Conference and, in parallel, on the 8. SQL-Server & .NET Conference. Apart from many organizational topics, Rainer also talked about the attendance count and what it means for the conference as well as the German developer community. The inter-annual drop in attendance is lower than the last year and reached 12%. This does not however mean that the user base of VFP shrunk by 12% as well. Not at all, Rainer believes that this is due to the overall drop in conference and fair attendance all over the world. This is especially apparent today, when the major cost cutting applies.

Even though there is the mentioned attendance drop, which by the way allowed for the convenient tables, Rainer is committed and happy to continue with organizing the conference for the next year again. Moreover, together with the German user group he plans to organize a Visual FoxPro road show in several German speaking cities. This has been tried already in 9 cities when VFP 9.0 was released and it has had an enormous success. It is planned as a one day event, making it even more affordable for attendees from both, time as well as money cost perspectives.

Unfortunately, Rainer also had to make a last change in the session schedule as Tamar E. Granor could not make it to the conference due to a loss in her family. Her mother passed away after being long time ill. We all convey out condolences Tamar.

Rainer again welcomed everyone at the conference and wished everybody to have a good time.

Introduction to Visual FoxPro 9.0 to Finished EXE – Jürgen Wondzinski

Right from the first morning session Jürgen is giving his presentations for VFP beginners.

These can be new reinforcements for existing VFP teams who need to get themselves fast on the right track, complete beginners or anyone else who would like to brush up on their knowledge.

In this series of four sessions Jürgen went from the very introduction into Visual FoxPro development, through the closer look at the database engine, programs, classes and forms, up to the menu creation, toolbars, reports and the final EXE file creation.

This way a complete newcomer could have grasped the basics of the VFP programming practically in just a single day.

Keynote (Visual FoxPro Stack) – Ken Levy

Before Ken actually started his session and explained what the “stack” in the name of the session really means, he showed the audience his former “hair stack”. It was back in 1997, when Ken was speaking here, at the German DevCon, for the first time. He remembers giving his presentation in shorts while it was snowing outside and he was wearing quite long hair at that time. This is the time I personally do not remember. I have known Ken only with his short hair, those he is wearing for quite a few years now.

Ken sees the “stack” as a set of improvements, upgrades, tools and community efforts around Visual FoxPro that keep the product still “under development” and alive since VFP 9 is currently no longer evolving at in Microsoft.

He wrote an article about the “stack” in the FoxRockX magazine. Its special and FREE edition, containing the article can be found on-line at http://www.foxrockx.com as well as at the conference hallways.

There are many vendor products and community efforts around Visual FoxPro nowadays. Hence there is no new development done in Microsoft, it is important to realize that by buying a vendor product, a framework for example, you support its author and cause even more development on the project, in a way, again, supporting the community. This way Visual FoxPro can grow for a long time to come, independently of the Microsoft’s ending support.

Apart from the different VFP frameworks, which are around for quite some time, there are also new projects coming, such as products from e-Technologia like .NET Extender and VFPCompiler for .NET. Even though the effort of moving VFP into .NET has been rejected by Microsoft quite a few years ago, e-Technologia found a way to bring VFP to the .NET world very close.

Also make sure you keep an eye on CodePlex, where most of the community driven efforts and tools reside.

For those of you thinking how to use more .NET in your VFP applications or perhaps even writing new parts of existing VFP applications purely in .NET or for those who are simple .NET curious Ken recommends visiting the VFP Conversion site at http://www.vfpconversion.com and reading some of the whitepapers available there.

If your existing project, written in Visual FoxPro has its data stored in the VFP tables and you would like to use the Client Server architecture, you should take a look at the Sybase Advantage Database Server, product from Sybase at http://www.sybase.com/foxpro. It can create a C/S access layer around the existing DBF files. This way you can either use C/S right away with your existing database or allow other application to use the C/S approach for accessing your internal VFP data. You can use Advantage to access and edit DBF/CDX data using the Advantage .NET Data Provider using Advantage as a wrapper container around existing VFP data. This allows you to build or migrate to .NET apps without having to change your VFP source code and data.

It is also important to realize where the IT world is going and keep finding the ways how VFP can be used in this environment. For instance in the new generation of various small, multi-touch devices, with virtualization or new operating systems, such as the highly praised Windows 7. Ken believes, that in spite of the fact, that the support from Microsoft is soon to end, they will anyhow make sure, that VFP applications still run on newest operating systems. Microsoft needs to make sure people can upgrade to the new operating system easily, no matter what applications they use, be it created by Visual FoxPro or other tool.

After Ken finished, Rainer took over, talking about conference related information and many other topics from the user group activity. He mentioned some of the new VFP books available, such as the Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP2 Update by Jim Booth and Sedna Update by Tamar Granor.

Rainer also again mentioned the planned road show as well as some details about the next conference. As already mentioned, new conference is being planned (dates are available up to 2014 by the way), just its form might change a bit. It will most likely be three instead of four parallel sessions and it might come to changing the conference into two days instead of the current three. The exact form is still unknown, but rest assured, we can be looking forward to another year already.

At the very end Rainer also reminded the audience, that there is a session on Saturday, where Tim Fischer from Microsoft Germany will show the new Microsoft plans in general as well as an overview of the Microsoft marketing activity for VFP in 2009.

Introduction to GDI+, Practical Uses for GDI+ – Doug Hennig

The GDI+ topic was divided into two sessions. The first one focused on the introduction to the technology whereas the other one tried to show the ideas of using the technology in the real world applications.

In the first session Doug explained that GDI is simply an API for displaying information on devices. As the code translates to the machine code later on, the GDI code itself is device independent. GDI+ then is the successor of GDI. Even though it is a very powerful technology, it is very not easy to use directly from VFP. You would have to get your hands dirty with different handles and the code would soon become illegible. This is where GDIPlusX comes into play. It is actually a wrapper that mirrors the System. Drawing namespace from the .NET framework, giving VFP all its flexibility as easily as possible. The wrapper was written by Craig Boyd, Bo Durban and Cesar Chalom and is available as a part of VFPX project.

Doug then continued by explaining and showing examples of various concepts, colors, shapes, pens, fillings and all of the available possibilities.

If you feel like playing with the technology yourselves, you can use the examples directly from the session as well as go through countless existing .NET examples on the web. Thanks to the fact, that the GDIPlusX is a wrapper around .NET, these examples can easily be translated to VFP. Other resources can be found on blogs of the authors or the GDIPlusX project homepage on VFPX.

In the second session Doug focused on the practical uses of GDI+. He started with an alternative to the TXTWIDTH function to measure the pixel length of the text. GDI+ can be much more accurate than TXTWIDTH and can easily be used for example to find the longest string in a table to adjust a field on a report for example.

There is also a capability of creating images from texts. This way it is for instance possible to draw an image of a text being dragged from one editbox to another one. While still visible when it is dragged, the user knows what he is actually doing and what he is dragging.

GDI+ can also create gradient images, screen snapshots and as such can help solving many hardly solvable problems. By taking a screenshot of a form and placing that image on top of all of its controls as another control, we can easily prevent user from doing anything with the controls behind it. This in fact effectively “disables” all the controls on the form. Similar technique can be used to “disable” an ActiveX treeview by taking a picture of the control and placing a mere image at its place.

Doug went on with similar examples, where GDI+ can be the right solution to various developers’ challenges.

The FoxPro .NET compiler – Boudewijn Lutgerink

The development of the Visual FoxPro as a product itself was stopped by Microsoft. The world began to be filled with words ending by “.NET” and it had been said that this was the (only) way to go now, period. No more space for the “old” VFP development. That is supposed to end.

Since Microsoft announced that VFP is not going to be in the .NET package, at the end of 2006 a company called eTechnologia decided to do something about this by itself and started developing a new product called VFP.Net.

VFP.Net is actually a compiler and is the means to move VFP into .NET in a way comparable to the way, other official .NET languages can. The development of the product is still continuing and after three years now, it is nearly ready for the real production use. In this session Boudewijn tried to summarize and show on various examples the current capabilities of the product.

Thanks to two errors in VFP and their right exposure, two limits could have been broken. It is the 255 fields limit and the 2GB limit. In fact, we can now store 16 exabyte now. That is 16.000.000.000 GB!

Boudewijn then demonstrated on various examples creating a winform application using the VFP language, many of the language improvements coming from the .NET world, such as Enums, showed how to include .NET forms in the VFP.NET applications, how to use ASP.NET using the VFP language etc.

Even though some of the examples didn’t work right in the session (a classical demonstration effect), all are well described in the whitepaper available for all attendees on the conference CD. There one can also find the latest beta version of the product to play with and test the examples on.

Beyond Visual FoxPro 9.0 – Ken Levy

In this late night session Ken grabbed some of his former projects, sometimes created as early as 15! years ago and started showing various tips and tricks coming from the time they were being developed.

It was basically a mixture of bits and perks of Visual FoxPro and showing how extensible it can be.

The coolest idea in my point of view and one I liked a lot personally was putting a form directly on the VFP screen. This way Ken was able to put a browser directly at the screen as a background. If you would like to try this, do not forget to set the seemingly useless property AlwaysOnBottom to true. This is just the proper time to use it.

Excellent OLE Automation – Venelina & Uwe

The layout capabilities of the VFP report designer are limited. What about using Office applications for the output? Excel is a good tool to create great formatted tables as well as business graphs.

OLE automation of Excel is not that difficult and allows you to use all features, for example creating business graphs. While Uwe explained the background behavior of Excel, Venelina ran the demos. Step by step the automation became enhanced.

In the last step the attendees saw a doughnut over a pie chart where all elements were drawn with 3D effects. Finally, with little code, the generated graph was copied to a Word document.

Friday, November 13

by Jan Vít

Microsoft Virtual PC for Developers – Doug Hennig

Doug started his session with an introduction to the Microsoft Virtual PC technology itself. He showed how to create a new machine, new disk, install an operating system and install the Virtual Machine additions. He then explored all the various settings and configuration options of the product as well as explained the main advantages and disadvantages of various disk types.

After this “how to use the product” part, Doug went on to the possible ways of using it in the real developer’s life.

First example is the installation testing. After creating an installation package of your application, you can test the installation and uninstallation on a clean machine to make sure you have included everything that is necessary in the installation package.

Another good use is for application testing. If your application works on your powerful development machine, it does not necessarily have to mean it will not be slow or maybe even unusably slow on the customer’s machine. The virtual machine allows you to set a specific memory size and network settings to make the machine performance more similar to the customer’s one.

Testing on different operating systems or under different languages and regional settings might also be a reason to use it.

If you would like to test the performance of your application, test application conflicts, do any kind of beta testing (even those of an operating system) or give training or presentation, virtual PC can help you do all that and not pollute your original machine at the same time.

There are also times when you need to use a (very) old application that would no longer run on your (newest) host system. Running a DOS application on Vista can be an example of this. You can do that, but you will have to get a special utility for DOS in particular.

Doug continued by talking about a few tips and tricks of using Virtual PC. Always make sure you have enough RAM on the host system - the more, the better. Try to run the VMs on a separate drive, the USB drive perhaps. On the host system, run as few applications as possible, regularly format the host as well as the virtual machine, use rather fixed-sized virtual hard disk drives than those with the auto-growth size.

Doug wrapped up his session by reminding that a Virtual Machine is also a machine as far as licenses are concerned and mentioned several other products similar to Virtual PC, such as Microsoft Virtual Server, Windows Virtual PC, VMWare or VirtualBox.

Data Access Smackdown – Craig Berntson

For those of you unfamiliar with the “smackdown” word, it is used for example in wrestling. It is a situation when two wrestlers come close to one another and try to put each other down as fast and as hard as possible.

The content of the session was very similar to the “smackdown” explained above, with one difference though. There are different data access technologies fighting each other, instead of the real wrestlers. No one was fit enough to challenge Craig.

Craig tried to compare the speed of the basic SQL data operations that is the speed of INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE. He used the Remote View, SQL Passthrough and a Cursor Adapter. Where applicable, he also tried it with Table and Row buffering in place. All of this was tested on 1 million records for insert and 100 thousand rows for update and delete.

At the beginning, everybody in the audience took a vote and tried to guess what the fastest method will eventually be. SQL Passthrough was the clear winner of this vote. We in the audience agreed on that the other methods will most probably be slower, but on the other hand, much easier to program. That is why they have been created after all.

As the results showed later, the fastest method for inserting the data was really the SQL Passthrough. In case of updating the data, all the methods ended up more or less equally. The last test, deleting the data revealed the same result, a tie.

Presentation of Visual Extend 12.0 – Venelina & Uwe

In time of the DevCon the new Version 12.0 of Visual Extend has been released. Venelina and Uwe demonstrated the key features. The new version comes with the VFX – DBF-CA Wizard which allows you to convert a whole VFX project from direct DBF data access to Cursoradapter data access. The wizard generates cursoradapter classes with standard settings for all tables and changes the dataenvironment of all forms to the use of cursoradapters instead of tables.

Due to the capabilities of the VFX cursoradapter class, the application can now run with a SQL Server database without any code changes. Beside this, the new version of VFX is focused on end-user features. Within a few minutes Venelina created a form that showed a business graph using GDI+.

The layout of the graph can be adjusted at design time using a builder or at runtime, directly by the end-user. GDI+ is also used to show a color gradient at the background of forms as well as at the background of pages of pageframes. This can be set globally for all forms in an application or per each particular form or page. Basically, with a few mouse clicks, the appearance of an application can be changed completely.

Another great feature for end-users is the task list. A user can assign tasks to colleagues, groups of colleagues or to all users. A record of a particular form can be attached to a task. If the user clicks on a task in his task list the form starts up and the record appears.

Introducing Visual Studio 2010 – Kevin McNeish

In this session Kevin focused on what is new in the Visual Studio IDE, neither the language nor the framework. There are special sessions for improvements in the .NET Framework as well as in C# language.

The IDE of the new Visual Studio has been reworked to use WPF instead of the “old” windows controls. In fact, with the introduction of Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft officially dead-ended the development of the WinForms. WPF as its successor is the way to go now. Using the WPF in the Visual Studio IDE allowed for new graphical functionality such as dimming, appearing, zooming, etc. Even though these are mainly minor changes, at times, the zooming functionality in particular, might come in handy.

There is also a new tool inside the Visual Studio named Call hierarchy. This allows you to get the overview of the future “call stack” already at the design time.

The Studio also adds more Silverlight support, new improvements in the Entity Framework, new third-party plug-ins are available from DB2 and Oracle for better integration. It also comes with more support for parallel programming as well. In the area of the source control, there is a new concept of Gated check-in, which prevents checking-in of the code that failed.

The ASP.NET code editor now includes several new snippets for HTML, ASP.NET markup as well as JavaScript. There is a new project type called Modeling. There you can create various UML diagrams, even when they have no real connection to the code. However there is already a class diagram capability in Visual Studio since its version 2005, which allows you to generate and adjust the code of a class based on the changes in the diagram.

Visual Studio IDE has always been very extensible. The version 2010 takes the possibilities even further.

If you consider getting the Visual Studio once it is released, check the comparison of features in its individual three versions. This way you can make sure you get the version you really need.

Whats New in .NET 4.0 – Kevin McNeish

At the time when the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 is coming out, Microsoft is also ending the further development of the WinForms technology. Its successor, Windows Presentation Foundation, has been around for some time now. The new version is coming out with even more new controls, multi-touch support available through Windows 7 and other tiny graphical improvements. To start creating WPF applications you can use Visual Studio IDE directly or a specialized tool called Microsoft Expression Blend, currently in version 3.0.

There are improvements in the Windows Workflow Foundation as well. There is a new set of assemblies (System.Activities.*) that replace the former ones. It also has an enhanced programming model, meaning no code beside, etc.

Windows Communication Foundation also comes with new functionalities. It now has the service discovery, allowing you to discover the services dynamically at runtime, new load balancing, versioning and decoupling.

Microsoft also invested considerable time and effort in parallel programming support. There are new special versions of for and foreach that can use the advantages of multi-core processors. New collections were added that are suited to parallel programming, etc.

Other enhancements can be found in the Entity Framework, security aspects as well as other areas, Kevin did not even had a time to scratch.

The last thing to mention is that .NET 4.0 now also supports a new group of languages, the dynamic languages, such as JavaScript, Ruby, Python, etc.

Software Protection – Boudewijn Lutgerink

Once your software is created, the risk of someone trying to use it in an unauthorized way is getting higher and higher each day. You should protect your software to minimize the risk.

There are actually two ways of protection. First is the code disassemble protection, the second one is making sure only customers, who paid for the software are able to use it. Both aspects were talked about in the session.

Once you make the final form of your application, be it EXE or DLL file, you should make sure it cannot be disassembled back to the original code. There are several tools available to do this. In his session Boudewijn introduced the most used ones and showed demos of their usage. He focused on Defox, Obfuscator, Refox, 1Way, 1Crypt and the Molebox.

There are also several techniques to make sure your software is used by the legal holder of a license. You can for example use the WMI to read the IDs of various components in the user’s computer, you can use cryptography and try to hide information somewhere in a cunning way or use the web based registration of the product. All of these techniques can then of course be combined together to get most of the security. Having your application secured properly in fact also means protecting your investments and that is as essential as locking the door of your house behind you each time you are going out.

VFX Late Night User Meeting – Venelina & Uwe

Not just a session but also a user meeting of VFX developers took place at the late night slot.

Venelina and Uwe continued to show the end-user features of VFX like the document management container. Venelina showed how this container can be added to an existing form. The class can manage any file type as well as items from Outlook. Files can be added with OLE drag&drop from the Windows-Explorer. Drag&drop is also possible from Outlook with e-mails, contacts, and appointments. Complemented by scan functionality the document management of VFX is really powerful.

At the end Uwe talked about his vision of the future of Visual Extend, possible future development tools and migration strategies.

Saturday, November 14

by Jan Vít

Interoperatibility between VFP and Visual Studio – Venelina & Uwe

Interoperatibility between Visual FoxPro and Visual Studio is one of the most discussed topics at this conference.

Uwe showed how to access a VFP database from a C# application.

Venelina created a user control which accesses a SQL Server database with VB and integrated it into a VFP form.

As the third example both worked on hard to develop a Silverlight web application from scratch, including SQL Server data access, web service and XAML form.

What is new in C# and VB.NET 4.0 – Kevin McNeish

Kevin already presented his session on what is new in Visual Studio 2010 yesterday. Today, he went through the improvements in C# and VB.NET 4.0 language.

The common denominator of many updates is the effort to bring the VB.NET and C# languages together as close as possible in the functionality point of view. This way, in version 4.0, VB.NET inherited the functionality already available in C# and the other way around, what was already available in VB.NET went into C# as well.

VB.NET was given the ability to create automatic properties. This way it is no longer necessary to define set and get parts of a property. These are created automatically with their default functionality. VB.NET also lost the need for the continuation character. You can still use it, but it will also work without it. You can just continue your code on the line below.

Through Lambdas, VB.NET now allows you to write in-line subroutines. New collection initializers in VB.NET make it possible to specify the value of an object’s properties when they are initialized.

Both, C# and VB.NET now have the dynamic support. This makes it much easier to integrate with Microsoft Office or dynamic APIs, such as IronPython.

Language now supports named arguments. This way you can call a method and pass the parameters in the order of your choice, providing you name them properly. It is also possible to mark certain parameters as optional and specify their default value.

Kevin went through these and other improvement bits in his slides as well as showed code examples of it in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE.

Microsoft Keynote – Tim Fischer (Microsoft Deutschland)

We already had the Keynote from Ken Levy on the first day.

Today, Tim Fischer from Microsoft Deutschland came to present the future of IT development technologies as they are seen from Microsoft’s official standpoint.

He talked about rich internet applications, cloud computing and of course the future roadmap of Visual FoxPro as Microsoft sees it currently.

Even though one might have expected a slide-only presentation with colorful marketing images and shapes, Tim went the other way and most of his session was a demonstration of new technologies in code.

Just the way everyone would like it to be on a developer’s conference.

Mere Mortals .NET Framework – Kevin McNeish

A framework for .NET? Why another framework? Is the .NET framework not enough? These are the questions you might ask.

The truth is that even though Microsoft is doing a lot in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE as well as the .NET Framework itself, there are still many areas, where a certain common logic or functionality could be put. Similarly, there are often tedious tasks performed all over again where a wizard might come in handy. That is where the MM.NET comes into play.

The Mere Mortals .NET is not really anything like .NET Framework. It is an application framework. If you take a look into its history, you will see it has been around for quite some time now. Its first version came out in 2002 and over the time MM.NET has accumulated the largest customer basis among all the similar frameworks on the market.

To build a solid application you definitely need a solid base. MM.NET can certainly provide one. Apart from a large base of already written reusable code and code libraries, it also offers various wizards and builders to make creating a new code as easy and fast as possible.

The whole framework gives a large emphasis on the business object approach. Not only that gives your application a good clarity and transparency of the code, it also shields your code against technology changes coming from Microsoft every now and then.

When creating a new project, you can use the Business Object template right from the Visual Studio project templates. That runs a wizard, allowing you to select the data source for you application and automatically generates the necessary business logic for you.

The MM.NET framework can also take care of other aspects in application development. It can handle business rules, translation of the UI, which is available directly to the end user if needed, security rules management, etc. The best of all, if you need to see how the framework works internally or you would like to make any changes of your own in it, you will be happy to know it comes with a complete source code.

There is also a free comprehensive documentation to the framework available online. Even if you do not plan to purchase the product in the future, it is worth checking it out. There is a lot of useful general information in there.

Internet Apps with Silverlight 3.0 – Kevin McNeish

Microsoft Silverlight is already a relatively mature technology to create a visually stunning web interfaces. Its graphics is very similar to Flash. If you have a Silverlight application on a web site, it acts like a black box and requires a small runtime on the client’s machine. With a few configuration changes, you can also run the Silverlight application right on your desktop, not in the browser anymore.

Kevin started his session by playing an HD video. This was to demonstrate the possibility to stream a high definition video over the internet by adjusting its throughput according to the bandwidth of the client’s connection. This is done through IIS Media Services, a free server product for HTTP-based media delivery and is an additional technology to the Silverlight itself.

Thanks to the new GPU acceleration Silverlight 3 now supports perspective 3D which can simulate rotating an object in 3D space. Silverlight 3 also includes the ability to create and apply custom shader effects as well as bouncing and elastic effects.

There are plenty of new controls available in Silverlight 3. It is the DockPanel, DataGrid, WrapPanel, TreeView, Label, ViewBox, HeaderedItemControl, AutoCompleteBox and Headered Content Control. There is also a new DataForm control which makes the master/detail interfaces much easier to implement.

Kevin then also talked about DataPager control, Navigation Framework, .NET RIA Services as well as other new Silverlight improvements coming in version 3.

The closing session – Rainer Becker

And there is the end again. After three days filled with Visual FoxPro, SQL and .NET sessions, everyone gather in the auditorium to listen to the last words of the conference organizer, Rainer Becker.

As the subtitle of the session told already, the session was aimed mostly on the future of the conference. We got some information bits already at the beginning of the conference as you can read about at the beginning of the report. Rainer now revealed a lot more about his plans for the future.

The conference dates are pre-set already till 2014 and no change is planned there. There definitely will be another conference next year. A change of its form however could not have been avoided due to organizational reasons.

The next conference will again take the whole three days, but instead of the four tracks, there will only be two. The first one will be targeted primarily at Visual FoxPro development, while the second one at the surrounding technologies and new trends. At certain times, there can be three sessions running in parallel, while those will mainly be the vendor sessions.

As the number of the tracks goes down to two, there will no longer be a guarantee of an English session running at any given time in the schedule. This in fact means that if you understand only English and would like to attend the conference anyway, there might be times to take a break and get some snack for example.

The conference tracks will take a form of a kind of “deep dive” sessions, meaning the given topics will be divided into more consecutive sessions. This will allow the speaker to grasp the topic in a much deeper detail. At the end of the conference, each attendee will also receive a certificate to confirm he/she has undergone the given sessions.

As Tim Fisher from Microsoft Deutschland again did a great job with the Keynote this year, it will be him giving the Keynote next year.

Now, coming out of the next year conference topic, Rainer once more reminded that a Visual FoxPro road show is being planned. He also announced the name of the cities. The road show will stop in Hannover, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich and possibly also in Zuerich and Wien.

The user group will also undergo changes. Its name will change to dFPUG.NET. The two conferences, the VFP and the SQL & .NET conferences will merge into one, the 17th year conference.

The closing session then wrapped up with a traditional raffle where the lucky ones were given several computer products from the conference sponsors. Congratulations!

Final Words & Acknowledgements

At this point, at the very end of the report, I would like to express my gratitude to all the people, who had helped me to make the report as comprehensive as seen above. My special “Thank you” goes to:

Rainer Becker, the organizer of the whole event for still keeping it in its finest shape. He has always been around and very forthcoming in accommodating all my needs as a reporter. Thank you, Rainer!

Michel Fournier, the inventor of the UT reporting, for providing the space as well as the opportunity to present the report directly to you, readers. Thank you, Michel!

Tina, Rainer’s right hand, who has always been making sure that everything went as smooth as possible and that all the attendees were feeling as comfortable as possible. I am always amazed how she can make everything fit together so smoothly without me even realizing it. That is called perfection. Thank you, Tina!

Uwe Habermann and Venelina Jordanova for providing several ready-made texts. Thank you!

Budewijn Lutgerink for quite a few pictures you can see in the picture archive. Thank you, Budewijn!

Lovely hotel personnel, who were always there to take care of me as well as every other attendee.

My extended gratitude also goes to many others, who have made my reporting job easier, if only by creating a wonderful place and atmosphere to be in and where everyone was smiling when the camera was in action. Thanks to you all!

I have very much enjoyed being around and writing the conference report again. Feel free to share your experience from the conference, any notes on the reporting as well as your ideas of the UT coverage improvements. I am always more than happy to get the feedback from you!

So much for this year! Thank you for reading this far!

Jan Vít, Vitsoft   Jan Vít is a student of the University Of Economics in Prague. Since 1993 he has been actively interested in programming as well as other areas of information technology. His computer experience started with PC 80386 with FoxPro 1.02, later followed by higher versions for the DOS platform and since 1999 he has been using the newest Visual FoxPro versions together with other programming languages and tools. Presently he spends most of his time with Visual FoxPro 9.0, MS SQL Server and C# in WinForms as well as WebForms development. He has been a regular speaker on the Czech Visual FoxPro DevCons since 2004 and is also the co-author of many DevCon conference reports from Prague and Germany. His work now mainly consists of developing software for pharmacies.