Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

Hope everyone has a great farewell to 2005 and a big welcome to 2006. The new year looks to bring lots of cool stuff, including more from the FoxShow and a new site, Learning Visual FoxPro , a collection of links to great new ways where new developers can learn about Visual Foxpro.

UPDATE: Effective 2/7/2006, I canceled my xDrive account after being told that my issue was still "hundreds, if not thousands" behind others in the support queue. If that isn't a reason why people should stay away from this company, I don't know what is. Looks like I'm not the only one either with problems with xDrive. I was looking for a reliable online backup facility. I agreed to pay them for the full year up front. Although my 5GB drive has approximately 1 GB free, one of my regular backups hasn't been successful since October. I also received a nice little missive that said "we've moved to a large system upgrade intended to improve the overall performance. As a result, the service has been unreliable. We do not have an ETA as to when the site will be completely fixed." Unreliable? I can't even back up or upload a file without an error. I've been dealing with Henry Forrest who seems very interested in helping me but back on December 6...

I've seen this ad on local TV but finally got to the site today. Very interesting especially for those in the UK and US who are interested in how their lifestyle affects the environment. They didn't have Canada so I had to settle for the US calculation but I'm about an 16. What was interesting was that if I travelled a bit more again, I shoot up to about a 20. What's your carbon footprint? Carbon footprint calculator

Craig does an excellent job of noting the top 10 Visual FoxPro stories of 2005. Among his notes: the departure of Mike Stewart, John Koziol and Randy Brown from the FoxTeam, the shipping of VFP 9, the loss of Drew Speedie, and the reranking of VFP in the TIOBE list. While he did note Whilfest 2006, he didn't mention Southwest Fox which is coming back in 2006 and will be sure to be a big hit and the SednaX site, which I'm sure will be showcasing an awful lot in the coming year. The other thing that I think is still valuable to note, although not entirely VFP-related, is the elevation of Eric Rudder at Microsoft to focusing on the overall technical strategy for Microsoft. With that and Tod Neilson now running Borland, former Foxers seem to be everywhere, rather than nowhere. Anyone have any Visual FoxPro predictions for 2006? 1. Ken Levy will sponsor the giving of Ultimate FoxEars headphones at Devcon 2006. 2. After a slow start, the SednaX site will start to s...

Andy Kramek has done another one of his "and now let me explain how this works" posts with a great 6 page discussion on the two data buffering functions (TableUpdate and TableRevert) in Visual FoxPro. His original article on data buffering (which explains what is buffering and the like) may be found here Combining this with the other learning resources that the other FoxBlogs are offering and there is no excuse for knowing everything about Visual FoxPro!

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Jeez, I hate going from tangent to tangent but I was about to. On my last post about Tag Clouds, just as I started talking about the teachers cheating , I recalled a conversation I had this holiday season with a couple who are in the academic world and was amazed when they expressed outrage (yes, it was real outrage and incredulity) that a teacher had to pass a test to become a professor at a university, to gain a higher position. The conversion went so far as to even suggest that competitions for government positions was "beneath" someone who had gotten to a certain point and a certain age. (ok - have you stopped laughing at this yet? Because it's true). I used the opportunity to drop in the obligatory Doonesbury ID joke because it's based on the same premise - if things don't grow, learn or evolve, then yes, I agree - it only needs to be tested once but since things DO grow, learn, mutate or whatever, then YES, test early and test often, I say. Small bu...

So now that Rick has put up the FoxBlogs tag cloud , some may be asking "what's a tag cloud?" Basically it's running the content analysis service from Yahoo (who knew they had one? Everytime Google talks about something, everyone's on it but Yahoo? Needs to do better job of marketing to developers- or maybe I should just listen better ) What does that do? Wow - no wonder no one likes to listen to developers ramble on...they talk and talk and talk but don't really say what it does... (this is because I just went through 5 minutes of links without a good "stand on its own" description.) Essentially, it attempts to put things into context automatically. For example, when Ken Levy talkes about Headphones , , the entire set of threads are tagged with that term. Now how does it recognize that term? That's the trick. From Yahoo's own Y!Q (context query), "Y!Q analyzes the context you provide and determines automagically the most i...

Very cool, Rick. As Visual FoxPro developers start blogging about things, they instantly get tagged. Very cool!

After hearing about the strange laws being passed by France lately, this one really had me going. So you can't have FREE software, but downloading " copyrighted files is legal as long as it is for private use only" - hmmm...maybe they don't get it after all. Then again, this was being reported from the Xinhua News Agency so who knows.

While I have been known to barbeque in the middle of winter, Craig's post made me smile. Because I woke up this morning and it really does look just like Christmas - there is white snow everywhere and soft snowflakes have just started to fall.... What a contrast to "The weather is warm, but not too humid, the days are long".

Gmail is slowly but surely taking over my life where a Microsoft product once held a very key place. (yes, this message has a lot of links just so you can see that it's no longer one product but several that does what needs to happen) I used to live in Outlook but after having worked with various Outlook and Desktop search tools, NewsGator Outlook and the like - my Outlook just freezes or crashes all the time - and that's AFTER reinstalling. gMail allows me to send emails and specify the outbound email (so it can come from my aksel address instead of my gmail). The Search is, not surprisingly, great (who needs to organize messages anymore?) but the biggest change just happened this week when they turned on mobile gmail at http://m.gmail.com. Where I used to rely on ActiveSync to ensure my PDA had all my inbox messages and the like, now I can get and respond to my email whereever I am (yes, I have a data plan with Rogers , my communications provider). Send email to others? Why n...

that Microsoft would name their foray into web 2.0 conferences Mix 06 when their most recent product features the most ridiculous DRM schemes around... Oh sure, they like to get into the "mix" with CrossFader but come on! Next thing you know their next Office or Development product will be dubbed "Open Sourcer" or "FavaBeans"... Ya sure, I get that it's not aimed at the DRM community but rather developers but calling it Mix just sits wrong with me. Cool logo though.

I'm taking an online course about Developing Smart documents and one of the modules is on Developing DLL-based smart documents (with Visual Studio) While obviously you have access to all of the core UI components (text boxes, lists, etc), one comment struck me: If none of the built-in controls match your requirements, use an ActiveX one. Bear in mind that ActiveX controls written in .Net framework langauges are NOT ( emphasis mine ) directly supported and it is recommended that you use COM-based ActiveX controls. Sigh - the more things change, the more they stay the same....

As much as I like talking about Drag and Drop, I'm not always sold on its usefulness. So I immediately found this little article (found via Yahoo) interesting: Sesame Software: going against the flow | The Register One thing that bugs me about reading news articles online - the real lame ones never put links to the COMPANY (because they want all the links themselves) so here 's where you can find Sesame Software and their Relational Junction ETL Manager (uh, I'll just call it RJet!). a tool that lets you "Extract Transform and Load production data into your data warehouse. Integrate Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Sybase, and DB2 databases. Leverage your existing SQL skills with native SQL scripting, or use our SQL builder technology." - oh yeah, did I mention? They have Visual FoxPro support coming soon. What does it do? It links data together so you can copy your data from one or more tables into a target table. Sounds a bit like BizTalk functionality but it...

This story keeps on getting more press . VARBusiness Nielsen and Borland - 'The Perfect Fit' Interesting because back in 1999, it was Tod who "leads Microsoft's Developer Group as it transforms the Web from a static tool into a vast network of personal and programmable services." If you read the background story, it really is fascinating. Back in 1999, here was the comment ""If you're building applications, I'd love to meet you, find out what you are trying to do, tell you about the products and technologies we have, and figure out a way for us to work together so you can build the best applications," Nielsen says "That's the key to success for developers and for ________." - What's cool is that Tod is still completely committed to doing it. What's interesting is where he's doing it - he's just raised my interest level in Borland which had dropped off a fair bit when Philippe Kahn was the CEO, who li...

Anil's Antisocial Behavior post is almost as good as all the comments under it as well. The reason that Google gets more "free passes" than Microsoft? Maybe there is something to that "Don't be evil" thing

Andy and Craig have already pointed to this: TPCI - TIOBE Programming Community Index . What I like is this statement: "The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system." In other words, don't come to me with ignorant statements like "no one works in Visual FoxPro anymore" or "it's a dead language" - seems I heard that mentioned ten years ago when PowerBuilder was the tool of choice. Where is that now? Oh yeah, I think it's number 90 on the list. Even last year, Visual FoxPro was higher than that. Sure the list is based on Google, MSN and Yahoo searches but hey - it's ALL about mindshare and the VFP community has plenty of it.

I love this post of Ed Bott's" Scoble can talk about Office 12, but I can’t As with all those great NDAs: "This information blackout applies to everyone except Microsoft employees, apparently." He forgot - and CNet employees too as it turns out. (granted Cnet is a news site - but since when is journalism and blogging not the same ? - oh right, as of January of this year!) I'm with Ed. From the VFP perspective, it's nice that the Fox team has opened up a lot more. Some users in the "private" forums are wondering "where is everyone?" because they're all out talking abou FoxPro and what they're doing. That said, it would be nice if they joined Craig's latest goal ": Today position 20, tomorrow the world! Now Craig...about that SednaX discussion and the FoxShow interview....

DevBlog: Daddy Rod Paddock The pictures don't seem to be coming up though...

Whil just announced the return of the Great Lakes Great Database Workshop 2006 with one track of 14 sessions covering every major aspect of Fox development. Sounds like he's gotten 10 speakers all set and ready to go for for developers not looking for the faint of heart developer conferences - his original email said (updated): "What can you, the developer who is committed to VFP as a long term development platform, do to optimize the next ten years of your life? This is the question that GLGDW 2006 is going to answer. This is not a marketing conference masquerading as a technical conference. This is not FoxPro for Dummies. There are no 'Intro to X' pre-cons or 'How to use feature Y' sessions here. This is an advanced workshop - for experts. This is a workshop for thoughtful people with attention spans. This is an event about wisdom." Sounds ambitious - but Whil usually pulls off a great conference and it's nice that it's focused directly on FoxPro...

Craig takes Calvin's original post and produces a revised set of classes, using GDI+ or not to great online bar graph examples . The SPS Weblog - Bar Graphs - Part II

Richard comments on my original post about misinformation, really promoting planning: "I usually spend two weeks (and sometimes even more) in the planning phase which includes the creation of the database structures and overall flow. " I'm not sure I agree that "thinking fast" is necessarily a bad thing but I certainly agree that "thinking deeply" is required with it. Consider watching Rick, Markus, Ken or Steve demonstrate a concept at a presentation - these guys think fast - yet they also think deeply at the same time. Just as there are too many consultants and IT specialists who act too quickly, there are also far too many consultants and IT specialists who prefer to get paid for "thinking" instead of "doing". The end result? Their project takes forever to get done and by the time it's done, they haven't really "thought" of what happens in the interim. Yet they get the reputation of being ...

Craig pointed this out but his partner in crime on the FoxTabs and Solution Explorer also has a blog where he goes through some of his trials and tribulations in coding with VFP. Great examples on this site! Scott Scovell on Visual FoxPro

So after my last post , I thought "hmmm---how does one ensure their application IS scalable?" Here's a good definition . Rick talks about it here but it's all about the web. Kevin talks about it when discussing the Mere Mortals framework here but again all about the web. The BlackBean site has a great repository of these and other articles. But once again, most of the articles deal with web-based VFP applications. No surprise there, I suppose. The fundamentals are typically the same and if you really want a scalable application, why not deal with an environment where there may be a million users coming in from all areas instead of your standard applications. What's great though - is the summary of Rick's To SQL or not to SQL. Using VFP data was recommended as a local data source for retrieving data. "When we converted from local data to a SQL backend data access turned more between 2-3x slower for short requests and up to 5-10times s...

So, Mary-Jo Foley calls VFP the "Rodney Dangerfield " child of Microsoft's solution and we wonder why there are mixed messages. Steve Black emailed me this post where the supposed "Head of information technology" at an Indian company had to upgrade because "the software was not scalable as it had been developed on FoxPro". Excuse me? The older software was probably not scalable because this guy, or the person who worked there before him, who had originally commissioned the software likely wrote it not to scalable. Yes, it was written in FoxPro - but it could likely have been written in Visual Basic.Net or Delphi or anything. Applications are not inherently "not scalable" because of the platform but more because of the design. Near the end of the article , the comment "Compared to legacy systems, which needed to be changed every six or seven years, SAP solutions are expected to prove effective for 20 to 25 years and beyond...

Visual FoxPro 9.0 Service Pack 1 has been released. Be sure your version gets updated. Here 's what they fixed.

My favorite Mind Mapping tool, MindManager, now directly supports OPML files with both Imporing and Exporting! Looks like my show notes for the FoxShow are about to get completely OPML'ized! It even includes support for the new Simple Sharing Extension for shared RSS!! MindJet - thanks for listening!!

Check out this Flash-based screen cast (the WMV version will be uploaded to the FoxShow shortly) about how the DABO Application Wizard works. It was done through an hour-long demo with Ed Leafe. Buliding Building an Application with Dabo I have some more casts on this technology that I'm just editing but I wanted to put this up so you could see it.

"Anthony Hopkin" FoxPro apps? Oooh....now I have a vision of a Fox head with a muzzle on it..."yes, I ate the SQL with some fava beans and a nice Chianti...."

And this says it all for a Friday! Too bad it's only Wednesday...

What is a harbinger of things to come from more tools I'm sure, Eqeus just announced that the new version of XFRX, a very awesome reporting engine for FoxPro, now exports to OpenOffice. So not only can you run your report (formatted) to Excel, Word and the rest of the world but now you can use your reports in the state of Massachusetts! Great stuff, Martin!

So maybe podcasts aren't going to be around to stay but you can at least enjoy classic bits of the master on your favorite MP3 player...

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's a direct link to the Mary Jo Foley column on FoxPro. Send her an email with your thoughts. There's not a lot of new news in the article - what's more interesting is that a journalist is covering it with the attitude of "maybe Microsoft sees that not everything is a DotNet world". Funny, because I think most FoxPro developers see Microsoft's attitude as being the opposite, despite the ongoing efforts but kudos to M-J for the article and the possible follow-ups it may generate. Let's make no bones about Sedna though: it's about making FoxPro play nicer in the DotNet and Vista sandbox. You can easily tell a bunch of VB developers to recompile their COM component in VS and now it's a DotNet piece. You can't say that to FoxPro developers because there's no upgrade path so for those developers who believe that "COM is the answer" (a mantra by Microsoft prior to DotNet) and are now stuc...

Craig Boyd just posted his Learning VFP 102 : All about Scope (not the mouthwash), he also discusses arrays. Great stuff Craig! One of the things I wish he had for this was a "take-away" or some kind of call-out that popped out on top to tell people what he was saying about important rules. Sure he gives out the source code but cheat sheets would be really helpful! One note: great example for using DEBUGOUT. So I'll start doing some on these take-aways. Although you may also want to refer to Andy Kramek's two part article as well. Part I His Guidelines 1. Stay away from public variables. Use screen properties instead for global objects or create a property on your form. Try and avoid them. 2. Also avoid private variables. (huh? - and he really didn't explain why.) Ah - he did mention on the side - send them as parameters instead. 3. Always remember to declare your variables. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. ( I just did a s...

I used to live in Outlook for all of my scheduling but somewhere between Outlook crashing, hanging, syncing with my PDA and using gMail for more of my regular email, I've really started getting into Trumba's Online Calendar tool. I can have both private and public calendars (or as many as I want). To protect privacy, I typically name the events fairly generically except as they relate to public endeavours such as podcasts, screencasts or public conferences. When users are looking at my public calendar, they can click the calendar icon and it will add it automatically to their own calendars (iCalendar, HotMail Calendar, Outlook, email or whatever) You can even allow others to update your calendar as well by sharing it. Or publish it as a Conference Schedule for easy access. Another very cool feature is the ability to synchro with Outlook so that my Pocket PC can always be up to date. Still - it's not perfect. Some things I wish it could do: a) allow others to request meeting...

Calvin's post shows how to write gradient bars in your grid. The actual execution is a bit wonky if you're not running on Windows XP but you can still see the results here. Note: this reminded me a little of Mike Brachman showing colored browse windows in FoxPro DOS way back when - except that the colors move with the form because they are directly attached to its HWND. Nonetheless, it's a cool example of what's possible when you grab some features from some DLLs (in this case OLEACC.DLL and GDIPLUS).

Rick - this is priceless. Just what I needed today.

I may have missed this earlier but the VFP Conversion site has been updated and it makes finding things a lot easier. Granted, Dan and Kevin look out of place with all of those haircut-challenged people but you can choose to read articles or blogs. What's particularly cool though is you can build your own RSS feed, filtering on developers, managers or just articles. Welcome to VFPConversion.com

Markus Egger sent me an email over the weekend, noting " this is scary..." Wrong spelling apart - what I found most interesting is that there is an Andrew McNeil who works as a senior product consultant for CIN Com in Australia with a comment like "While legacy thinking may be a problem, 'herd thinking' may be an even greater contributor to problems in IT organizations," McNeil says. "This thinking leads to a silver bullet mentality, which causes technologies to be over-hyped then subsequently [creates] a backlash." But of course, the first search result was from Mr. McNeil who is the director of Institute of Alcohol Studies, who "thinks a major factor in high consumption among young people is the affordability of alcohol," (note only the Cached version of the site shows this reference anymore) and follows on with all kinds of funny comments like "Andrew, if you have the cojones to set me straight" It reminds me of ...

Great post comparing Steve Jobs and Bill Gates presentation styles - one that I saw mirrored at the Visual Studio launch. Considering that Microsoft Press publishes Cliff Atkinson's Beyond Bullet Point , it's amazing that Microsoft still allows people to present this way. Yes, it's hard - especially if you're presenting online because you can't see their faces but then again, I don't imagine that when they're on stage in front of 2000 developers, Bill or Steve are looking at anyone's faces either.

A few of us were chatting around the coffee machine at work the other day discussing what would happen if Google bought Visual FoxPro from Microsoft. Now that's an interesting conversation...for one, GoogleBase would likely be super fast and incredibly cool. Microsoft is on a " disruptive " streak these days - how could FoxPro be made more disruptive? Well, Craig's started that one off. I wonder what wwGoogle would look like? I'm intrigued by what Rainer said on the FoxShow about what's coming for the FoxExtend platform. In fact, I even had a dream last night (bad sign when you're dreaming about work!) where I was describing ways that FoxPro could really take advantage of the new RSS and SSE services. Unfortunately, the details were in the part I can't recall. Is it hard to make a product as old as FoxPro disruptive? I don't think so - look at what Rick Strahl did with West-Wind. I remember back in 1994 seeing someone in Germany...

There is a third alternative, Ted: Manufacturing can't keep up and they figured it was better to ship what they had when they could and then keep them coming. Now then, the reports of the crashes? That can definitely be put into your formerly category. Ted's Radio Weblog

From Bob Kocher: There are still some details to work out so specifics will have to wait a week or so. For now, I am extremely pleased to announce Southwest Fox will return to Tempe, AZ Thursday, October 19, 2006 through Sunday October 22, 2006. We have a great new location this year and we are working on a couple of new and exciting ideas. from Rick's original post: Shedding Some Light: Southwest Fox 2006!

Found this from Alex Feldstein's link - a good quiz to take for anyone who responds to emails. MailFrontier Phishing IQ Test

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

Great site, noted from Wildfire. I particularly like this image:

1. Why is it that Newsgator can't always find the right feed when I use the Subscribe with Newsgator shortcut? It couldn't find the proper link to www.sunshinedna.com even though FireFox and other browsers could. It's just very frustrating. 2. I know a lot of people are coming up with great ideas about OPML and such as a way of sorting or weighting different topics - I use the Folders in NewsGator online all the time - it would make MY life (maybe others as well) a lot easier if I could assign Locations to individual Folders as well as specific blogs. For example, I have a folder called 10 Blogs I Must Read Immediately (which only has 3 in it right now) and then I have folders for FoxPro, Diversions, Microsoft, Podcasts, Tech, Product Stuff, etc. It works very efficiently as I can create my own type of Attention planning piece there - the only thing is - I wish I could have new blogs suggested for those different folders. If the Folders concept grew just a little fu...

Trying to keep down the noise/signal ratio, I try not to link too much to Scoble because either : a) everyone else already has b) if it's a microsoft story, it's usually redundant because of COURSE he has the story (and although I'm interested- there's no sense in linking to it) c) it's too much about Seattle and the West Coast which is nice but I'm not there so... d) I'm just not interested e) he no longer links to me - (KIDDING!) But his no-GYM posts have been really quite fun. What I really enjoyed though was this blog about the SunShine movie and Gia Milinovich, who is blogging it here . OK - it's a SCI-FI movie - so big time geek alert - and so the blog has lots of cool posts about Sci-Fi trivia (et al) but this post about suttirat (a new adjective and name of the costume designer) was so cool. She actually BUILT communicators. From the post: "The comms units are a cool and geeky bit of kit. Suttirat got her inspiration for th...

Just found out this morning that DevTeach won't be offering a separate Fox track this year at all. No - Jean-René isn't abandoning FoxPro but it's simply the economics of it - I imagine that with the last conference, there were a lot more sponsors and such from the DotNet world than from VFP and as a result, there's no loss there. The real factor is that not enough VFP developers were attending. I wasn't at the last show but it would appear that the VFP developer showing was fairly low. That's really too bad for Fox developers as J-R puts on a great conference but not bad if you want to visit a great city and learn more about the internals of Visual Studio. I'm sure Markus and Kevin will do a great job of lining up great sessions. So now you either consider Advisor DevCon , Southwest Fox or any of the amazing European and Australian conferences. Hey Markus - how's the VFP Road Show looking? Maybe that would be a good thing to wrap into a VF...

This is interesting. I'm communicating with a Russian programmer through MSN Messenger using this Paralink Online Translation utility. But the translation definitely needs some clarification but it works pretty well. Know what I think? I think someone should come up with an IM client that does automatic translation. Anyone know of one? Update: Paralink has one . Very cool - not completely integrated but close. Free Translation Online

Boy, that "Microsoft is not evil" comment from BuzzOutLoud is going to continue to grow with Ray Ozzie's new stuff. Microsoft's Simple Sharing Extension for RSS is being released under the Creative Commons license Attribution share-alike license. And it answers one of my biggest complaints about the way Microsoft has done things for developers. To quote but we decided we’d never get short term network effects among products if we selected something complicated – even if it were powerful. What we really longed for was "the RSS of synchronization" ... something simple that would catch on very quickly. That's the spirit! What's funny is that he uses a Lotus Notes example to show what's he talking about: Notefiles replicate by using a very simple mechanism based on GUID assignment, with clocks and tie-breakers to detect and deterministically propagate modifications. Something like this could easily be represented in XML. Now we...

On Friday, I noted Andy Kramek's post about the timing of the next Advisor FoxPro Devcon which is scheduled for August 27-31 in Phoenix, Arizona which would appear to conflict with the Southwest conference in Tempe, Arizona a few weeks later. Not only did I post about it, I also emailed my editor at Advisor asking if they were aware of the scheduling and why this might possibly be considered a bad move on part of the community. Not only did I hear from them, I also heard from Ken Levy who wanted to assure me that "Microsoft has nothing at all to do with the dates, locations, or speaker selection at any VFP conference world wide, and that the VFP team is not involved in any decision making there". That's good news - in fact, he heard the news when he first arrived in Frankfurt. So why would Advisor decide to do this? Well, for one, the FoxPro devcon isn't their only conference. As it turns out, they are offering several conferences: GroupWise, Access, .Net, Lotus, ...

Saw this on Anil Dash 's site. It's important to every single blogger out there today, even the ones who just want to talk tech. The US recently followed suit to Canada where any kind of commentary on a blog is akin to being a political contribution. I'm not typically political on this blog but I do want to support organizations who do stand for protecting our rights. The RIAA has shut down Mashuptown who went out of their way to promote the artist's iTunes records. So why support the EFF? Because they are supporting you and your rights: - blog anonymously - keep sources confidential (think how Mini-Msft must feel) - Fair use of intellectual property (you do quote sources don't you?) - Allow Reader's Comments - Freely blog about elections - Blog about work (but be smart about it!) - Access as media Check out the EFF's How to Blog Safely guide .

First thing I heard of this Andy - I've been down in the weeds of work for the past few days but it certainly doesn't pass the smell test . Hmmm...I'm an editor with FPA - wonder if they'll tell me why did this. Sounds like a surefire way of getting out of the FoxPro conference business. I know sometimes they've come back and said they were asked to organize their shows around other schedules such as launch, etc - I certainly hope no one from the MS Data Team has anything to do with this. Update : I have been told by Ken that in this case, the timing had nothing to do with the MS Data team. I'll update more in a separate post. FoxPro ILL-Advisor

Great post Alex - glad you found this. Figures that Visual FoxPro would help out in drag race software. Alex Feldstein - Powered By Bloglines

Thanks Alex for pointing this out! By the way, the RSS Feed for the F1 Technologies is hidden through Blogger but it's available here ! When does Mickey get his own Blog?

You can access it as a web service, directly over the web or wherever. I deal with a trucking software company and I always used to hear that this information wasn't freely available - so the data may be slightly out of date but being able to pull this so freely is great. Pass it an address, city and state and it can come back to you in CSV or XML. geocoder.us: a free US address geocoder

Just saw this over on zdNet but then wanted to try it out. I think David may be right when he talks about the potential of what this could do. Wikis aren't just for group blogging or information - now you've got a live application for it as well.

First PM at Microsoft, then SVP at Oracle and now CEO or Borland. Seeing as he had just become the SVP at Oracle in September. Tod was the guy who I mentioned on the FoxShow at the same time as Jon Sigler who moved over to FileMaker.

Way too much fun with Google Maps. Noted by Alan Bourke on the ProFox list.

Nice to see that with enough public outcry, Sony will react in the right manner. I guess now I can cancel those "No Sony" buttons. As noted: The whole ugly affair has turned into a nightmare for Sony BMG, and deservedly so. People were understandably angry about Sony installing software on their system that would cripple Windows if they tried to remove it while giving other malware authors another route into their systems. Thomas Hesse, President of Sony BMG's Global Digital Business Division didn't help with his assertion that what people didn't know wouldn't hurt them. Well now they know, and Sony is the one left with egg on its face. Let's see what it comes up with next from its apparently bottomless bag of proprietary technology and bad DRM. Sony BMG caves to outcry, drops DRM software

Eric Sink (Update: I previously said Eric Rice - who does AudioBlog, not SourceGear - thanks to Ranjith Anthony for recorrecting me) continues his posts, certainly qualifying him to have one of the most valuable site for software developers and managers. This one is on Testing, or debugging, or the horrors of shipping on Halloween. Especially in the wake of Microsoft's launch of Visual Studio, this post is an exceptionally good read. He describes each bug with four qualifiers: frequency, severity, cost and risk. Sound obvious? Read it - print it and then send it to your nearest manager. This is an article worth reading especially when he compares levels of severity: # The top of the graph represents a bug with extremely severe impact: "This bug causes the user's computer to burst into flame." # The bottom of the graph represents a bug with extremely low impact: "One of the pixels on the splash screen is the wrong shade of gray." How many times have you had t...

So yesterday was the Ready to Launch event in Ottawa, celebrating the release of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and the, uh, imminent release of BizTalk 2006. No Wifi - (which I found really hard to believe at a tech event) - which meant the GPRS on my ipaq6315 got a good workout but because I don't have a good Pocket PC blogging tool for blogger (anyone know of one? - and no I don't mean moblogs - that's a PITA - I'll rant on that later) OK - so we get the idea that they are ready to "Rock the launch" based on the music and the bouncing balls (where everyone applauds when they pop! - clean up crews must really like that). Visual Studio Rocks - where have I heard that before? Back in 2004 and before... Funniest pre-show comment: "do we have to watch this?" - one of the Microsofties who was managing registration (yes, likely a hired hand) My first thoughts? Well, let's say 45 minutes on PowerPoint for a DEVELOPER launch? Jef...

Wow - it's moved from Nigeria to the UK now...just got an email "My name is Susan Bryant, I am an artist with my husband Tommy Bryant, We own Sus Art World in London(United Kingdom)I live in London United Kingdom, with my two kids, four cats, one dog and the love of my life my husband Tommy Bryant." and of course it goes on to say "I'll give you 10%" for every transaction on my money orders"... Well it's to be expected - Microsoft said they would work with Nigeria to crack down on it - so now the spammers move around. Shakespeare needs to be updated: First you kill all the lawyers, then the spammers, then the phishers... Update: (and now an email from Sarah Guei from Cote d Ivoire as well. I really do feel for the people whose names actually match the spammers - they must show up on every no-receive list everywhere)

Priceless - Korby Parnell's Gotdotnet Wunderkammer : Loyalty to Visual FoxPro: the SednaX Generation : "May you stay long, do great things, and spread the good word about CodeGallery. Note: gotdotnet will be down today for a significant upgrade." Don't stop the discoverability - on that note, I'll be at the Ottawa Visual Studio Launch tour today - not sure if I'll blog it, podcast it or picture it - or all of the above. Could be fun...

While looking at the refactoring project over on SednaX, I found myself writing up some quick little code analyzer classes designed to see whether or not a function should be refactored or not. Looking at that chart, it shows FoxPro has some numbers like 35 single lines of code per function. Wow - that seems low but maybe not. So tell me - what do you consider to be the ideal number of lines per code / function for readability, maintainability in your programs? Take the Poll and let me know...

While the jury may still be out as to the overall quality of Visual Studio, there's still not an excuse not to learn it. Microsoft E-learning is offering FREE courses and clinics (for 90 days) on all aspects of VS for both Web and Desktop based development. Have to sign up soon though - offer ends Nov 17th.

http://foxpro.ntsl119.com/archives/00000540.html hmmm...wonder what rss reader he's using....while i'm about ready to toss newsgator outlook - outlook and the pst file is just way too slow - newsgator online rocks!!

is that ever sad...been there though - the cosmetic part is always true,though how many foxpro developers have a similar story due to the reality of the vfp native interface? "why can't it look like a windows app?"

Late last month, I made a post about FilmLoop, and someone noted that Slide has been doing it for a while as well. Then I went to Nial Kennedy's photos from the Live event and saw a show done via Flickr. Reminds me of blogging tools - so many companies doing similar things, competing - which is good, right, Ted ? Now, FilmLoop has drag and drop but you have to download a player, Slide also has a player/intergration tool wih a sidebar. The tool you use is the one you like - but I really enjoy the concept of the slideshows over going to personal web sites and having to choose the pictures to view.

Awesome! STILL beta - but then what isn't beta? Every software obviously required more testing when it breaks when you need it the most. Great stuff guys! I LOVE the Recent Files option - only what's that Solutions popup for? Craig Bailey's thoughts: VFP: FoxTabs beta available

This is old but hilarious! Got this from FoxPro.Catalyst - as quoted Visual Basic 6.0 ™ was the preferred IDE for the majority of experiment primate subjects. Primate Programming(tm) Inc

Yeah, ok so they have some stuff like VOIP integration - but it's not there yet. It's "coming" in the future. So what the purpose of the demo? Was it worth the negative press to show stuff that isn't ready for primetime?

Uh - how do I explain this to Americans...especially those who are behind building www.live.com... Just because someone is from Canada does NOT mean they only speak French. I sign into Live.com thinking this will be the second coming (despite the reviews ) - hmmm...decidely underwhelmed....but then I say, maybe what's new will have something. Oh they have something - in french . Now I'm not sure why - maybe because I said I wanted the weather in Ottawa, but the rest of the site is in English - is it something weird with my profile? (wouldn't be the first time) But worse - you can't change it to English. What's up with that? (and before you ask, YES my settings were set to English (UNITED STATES). Anyways - I'll hold off on final judgement but definitely underwhelmed. Even Google home page provides more right off the bat and that's been out for a while.... Come on guys - EXCITE ME - the dev teams' work on LINQ shows that you have a l...

Greg Hughes (via Malcolm Greene on ProFox) has a link to Microsoft's Linux lab and view on open source software - a recorded session with Bill Hilf, who runs Microsoft's Linux and Open Source Software technology group (yes, you read that right!)

As noted on David's blog , FoxTalk is getting a new editor. Before anyone jumps to any conspiracy theories, take a listen to David's interview on the FoxShow where he explains why it was time to pass the torch. In an upcoming show we'll talk to Rainer as well as he gets prepared for the 12th dFPUG conference .

Great article on Ruby on Rails, the environment that 37 signals uses for BaseCamp and Backpack among others. While I continue to hear about this framework to help web developers be more productive, I find myself thinking very much about West-Wind WebConnect 5.0, still in beta and the buzz that was generated at the Southwest Fox conference about it. No, they aren't the same thing (one is open source, the other isn't) - but the key goals are the same - simplicity in web development.

Ken's latest blog entry raises some interesting points - 1) he's taking part in a chat on VB 9 Language Enhancements on Nov 1. We all know that the VFP team is working with the other groups especially as it pertains to data so this may be a good opportunity to hear more about it. But perhaps more importantly is the following comment: Parts of Sedna will be written in VB 9.0, and our current plans are to include all of the source code (VFP, VB, C++, etc.) of Sedna with Sedna. And then considering his comment in the October newsletter about attempts to make aspects of the VFP source available and then also possibly making a change in the EULA to make it distributable... Combine that with the SednaX project and you have a very COOL open community (not open source) initiative. It will be interesting to see what (if any) other features from VFP show up in the VB 9 language.

Craig notes it here and I just got my MSDN flash telling me so....this must be why the MSDN Subscription downloads page is SO SLOW this morning.... Congratulations to all teams involved - the first of many releases that MS has coming I, for one, certainly hope Rick's last issue is dealt with - nothing worse than telling us versionitis is going away only to have it come back. Ok guys - enough time in the sun - get back in and finish off Orcas I agree with the B-man - "We just can't make our customers wait three or four years for the things which should have been on more interim cycles," (Balmer) said at last week's Gartner Symposium/IT Expo in Orlando. " DevBlog: VS & SQL Server 2005 Available

Great article on the memories that an office building can hold, especially as you prepare to leave it. Even if you can get wi-fi on a hog farm. The End of an Era

Any budding artists (or companies who have used a good Fox logo recently ) - I need a good logo for the Fox Show. I'm thinking of a cartoon Fox listening to a headset or a stylized logo with the Fox logo. Anyways shoot me an email at foxshow / gmail.com if you have some ideas. Thanks! Some caveats here: 1. It can't use the MS Fox Head logo (that's copyrighted - since the show is Creative Commons - the logo can't use copyrighted stuff) 2. While I was thinking of using this : I would rather something a little more "serious" - although it can certainly be fun.

FilmLoop is a new player that Guy Kawasaki noted in his Garage list. It's interesting - they call it photo broadcasting - sounds a lot like Flickr but the take is different. The slides are done in a nice looping show that you can add your own pictures to as you go through it. Adding your own Loop - it's very cool - and easy to do - just add a bunch of pictures. People can comment on each one (like Flickr) but the slideshow context is a very neat idea. And there are sponsors throughout to help make it worthwhile. I just wish there was sound.... FilmLoop is here FilmLoop Invitation from Guy Kawasaki

Ken posted it yesterday but VFP is now part of the MSDN Product Feedback center. So what does that mean? Well this means you can submit bug reports, ERs, etc directly to the Fox team directly through this site, you can review existing bugs, etc. And hey! Emerson Reed and j_h_p_l were the first to take them up on it. What's especially cool are the stats Statistics 41627 registered users 9282 suggestions 20063 bugs Active Feedback 1192 suggestions 2988 bugs Is there any way we can get that shown to be specific to a product or technology like, say, VFP? All in all, another example of how, as Craig says , Microsoft IS supporting Visual FoxPro.

One quote should be enough to get the gist of this post: So let me try to make this VERY simple for anyone "on the fence" over what NOT FOR RESALE means... It means, "NO YOU CANNOT SELL THIS SOFTWARE!" I guess that would be kind of like those signed personalized copies of Visual Studio or XP that some individuals got that were promptly offered up to the highest bidder. Microsoft Small Business Community Blog : Ok, say it with me... "Not For Resale."

Craig and Scott had some issues with bandwidth so we're sharing the duties over here - download the Australian FoxPro Podcast from our FoxShow mirror site here Great show! Ah - I see I didn't need to mirror it. Oh well - I'll remove it after the other one is reloaded.

Now this could get interesting...wonder where the API is. Of course, Google's official word was "We think it's an exciting product, and we'll let you know when there's more news." � Google Base - Web 2.0 Central: Web2.0, Ajax, Beta, Alpha, Startup, Companies

Glad to hear it, Alex. Alex Feldstein - Powered By Bloglines

Now this is something that would be really valuable when trying to make code readable. Granted, once you understand regular expressions, you probably don't need them - but still I'm glad Claudio was able to explain that @"^(?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z]).{8,10}\s$ isn't just a new swear word. Claudio Lassala in Software Development: Can you please put some comment on that Regular Expression?!

Quote from Stephen Vaughn - Nichols: I haven't been a big fan of personal database programs for a long time now. The only one out there these days that I care for at all is Microsoft's Visual FoxPro. Yes, I can say good things about Microsoft products—when they really are good. Great quote - thanks Ted. Ted's Radio Weblog

Ken's got a variety of posts including a link to the Southwest keynote , some hints on accessing VFP 9's Report XML output, the PDC 2005 video, speaking at the Seattle Code Camp and Tamar's new Taming VFP SQL book . Also, almost missed this but there's a new case study as well, where they talk about automating Visio with VFP. Hey! didn't I write about that somewhere ? Ken Levy's Blog

- UPDATE: It was Tod Neilsen - In Fox Show #28, I was commenting on how Jon Sigler is now working a FileMaker and there was another name from the past who was front and center at a recent Oracle Developer's conference. In the show, I threw out the name Robert Green, which is wrong. Ken Levy has pointed that out to me. But does anyone recall the news story? So much for the power of Google and search - it was a very short story but the essence was "developers must have done a double-take when they saw ________ at the recent Oracle conference" Thanks for the correction, Ken - now who was that masked man? It was Tod Nielsen. See here and here - uh, unless you can read Chinese you won't have much luck with that last one - but funny enough, the English version didn't turn up on Google but hey wow! Google's translation did a good job - "Tod Nielsen is the Oracle whole world sale support and market department vice- President". Too bad I can't find the o...