Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

Seems like Rick isn't the only one who needs to come out of his office more often these days. The MasFoxPro petition, started earlier as a way for developers to say to Microsoft "please release VFP 10", has seemingly brought out a bit of ugliness in the community. While you have many developers (quite a few in the Foxite community) encouraging everyone to sign it, there are others (many of whom appear as high-profile in the community) who have decided not to. Kudos to Rick and Doug Hennig for explaining their positions (and Alex among others). This isn't to say kudos to not signing the position - but to explain their positions. I especially appreciate Rick going over areas where he DOES give examples where he has criticized FoxPro. The petition reminds me a little of the Petition Microsoft to Start Marketing FoxPro on the Wiki back in 2001. There was a bunch of hooplah then about who didn't sign the open letter. The reasoning is still the same. Microsoft does...

I had spoken earlier about VFP on Rails, which unfortunately had to be renamed (Rails was very smartly trademarked by 37Signals so Brian has decided to rename it Fox Trails - which is very cool. I finished off my screen cast (the actual podcast is still forthcoming) and you can check it out below- (apologies to the audio, we were on speakerphone so it made it kind of hard to clean up) The Fox Show podcast: News, reviews and training on Visual FoxPro but yes, the FoxShow is back - ideally more than monthly but at least monthly for all FoxPro developers. If you have a product that you want to showcase or technology you want to talk about, drop me a line. (as always, there is no charge to be showcased on the FoxShow - we want the Fox WORD out!!!) Powered by ScribeFire .

Snooping around on Foxite , I found this blog which has been around for a while but I hadn't heard of it. There's a lot of good code on here as well as analysis on various tools and recent events. Check it out! Tod means Fox Powered by ScribeFire .

After hearing about Brian's speech to the Chicago Fox User Group and then reading more from Randy Jean's Blog: Exploring VFP on Rails , I just wanted to try it on my own. Randy's post goes into a lot of great detail with some code, so I'll let you read it there but the benefit of VFP in a Rails style environment is that it's SUPER easy to create an application to get you started: create a web share and register a single very small COM server. That's it. And then you can customize it on the fly. I know of a few developers who downplay the "buzz" of Rails, noting that it's not as scalable as some environments or that all of the tools just aren't there. 37Signals , part of the group that created RubyonRails or at least made it super popular with their BaseCamp and other related sites, addressed this in their Getting Real book - with their approach of interface first, then worry about scalability. (you can read it online here ) - the main take-awa...

I subscribe to Giveaway of the Day just for those few changes when they have a tool that I could absolutely use. Today was one of those days - the VideoGet service is a great way to download those videos you see on various sites (such as YouTube or others) and then save them as WMV or AVI or whatever. Very handy - especially when you want to ensure you can keep a copy of something to watch offline. Giveaway of the Day » VideoGet Powered by ScribeFire .

Is there any developer who has to build help for their products who hasn't tried West-Wind Help Builder? The ability to quickly create developer help from your Visual FoxPro projects and DotNet aside - this tool just makes it very easy to build help. I've played with Robohelp (older versions) and I couldn't handle it - I don't want a Word clone to build my help file - I want a tool that looks like the help file as I'm building it and that's exactly what Help Builder does. Plus, the integration with SnagIt rocks! I'm especially excited about 4.40 (that Rick Strahl just posted about) though because it helps deal with posting the HTML help to non-Windows-based servers. We have recently hooked up with a hosting site that gives us pretty much unlimited storage for our files and so I've posted our help files up there. Only problem? It's linux-based so everything is case-sensitive and doesn't like \ for path modifiers. Until recently, I've had to b...

I was going to note this earlier but the Computerworld site was down a huge amount (Java errors and everything) and so now I found that Craig posted about it: DevBlog: ComputerWorld on Fox I spoke with Eric Lai (the author) for a good hour about FoxPro and the like - nothing like watching an hour turn into 2 quotes and of course, they weren't my favorite quotes either, either. C'est la vie! The funniest part was when he was mentioning how his vision of FoxPro developers was of a bunch of 50 and 60 year-olds. Granted we may all have a few gray hairs, but if you looked at Alex's photos from the MVP Summit and the Fox Gang, there's a quite a few young'uns. A good article definitely - although I don't think you'll ever see MS turn over the real source to OpenSource especially since Calvin confirmed there's VFP Technology in SQL Server. ( I think it's on page 2 of the article). If you can get to the site, the direct link is here , Powered by ScribeFire .

Now this sounds super interesting and something I've been actively interested in seeing for a while. Anyone who wants to post notes about this afterwards or maybe even stream or blog it, please do! Brian - I hope you're planning on hitting some of the upcoming conferences! I think FoxForward even has a session track expressly for this type of approach! Chicago FoxPro Users and Developers Group Powered by ScribeFire .

While I'm likely not able to attend either of these conferences, they definitely are go-to conferences. Also coming up soon: Advisor's Devcon . At least it feels like the conference season is being spread out a little more. Shedding Some Light: Southwest Fox - Help Spread the Word FoxForward 2007 Any one know if there will be video streaming from any of these? Powered by ScribeFire . FoxPro VFP