Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

Ted Roche posted a great item on ProFox linking to this post. It's typically about designers but it's just as relevant to development. Thanks Ted. AIGA position on spec work: Design & Business: AIGA Powered by ScribeFire .

Neil Davidson has a great post on the Business of Software blog: The inevitable death of the ecosystem in which he notes how Microsoft is moving into arenas previously filled with their third-party partners and are now competing with them directly. The concern? "Third parties will start to leave the ecosystem and they won’t be replaced. " So what about the FoxPro ecosystem? With FoxPro being unleashed, we have a choice: leave it or tend it. The FoxPro community is full of great tools, some competing with each other while others are more complementary. But what is relevant here is that we no longer have to worry about Microsoft possibly coming out with a new feature that will hamper the existence of an existing tool. I recall when the new hooks for the report writer were first being talked about and there was an active discussion from Microsoft about how these changes might affect third party products. Instead, we are free to build and enhance the great tools that we have be...

Tod wrote a great post on 7/30 5 Ways to Automate Development in FoxPro I don't use all of these approaches but I did want to touch on his Using Project Hooks and describe one of the ways we make use of this. We have a fairly "remote" development team with developers in Canada, the US and aboard. We use SourceOffSite to manage our code base which offers its own challenges but one of the trickiest things we have to deal with is creating production builds with the latest versions. If I build version 2.5.1 of an application and my co-worker has to build it the next day, we want to make sure that he builds version 2.5.2. Now, sure, you could always make sure you get the latest of the project metadata via SourceSafe but that's a bit of a hassle. Instead, we maintain a table with all of the version numbers for the various apps (there are over 100). The table is stored as XML on our web server. In the BeforeBuild process, when building an application, we download the XML fil...

I don't always recommend running beta software for production purposes but sometimes, when it's good and solid, you can make your own products better or at the very least, make your development day easier. Cesar has done a great job outlining many of the new features to be found in Sedna here: Cesar Chalom : VFP9 SP2 / SEDNA USEFUL LINKS In particular, the report enhancements to be found in the Visual FoxPro SP2 beta have been demo'd in a video by Lisa Nicholls - what looks really exciting is the ability to rotate text in a very easy way. More importantly, Cesar has noted how he is working directly with "pieces" of SP2/Sedna today and how some are directly available without installing the "beta" version of Sedna. For example, you can download the My Namespace directly from Doug's site and he also posted the new Report apps from SP2 on Foxite .

As noted below by Ted Roche. Interesting list. Ted Roche’s weblog - Mission: Interoperable. Competition breeds Innovation. Monopolies breed stagnation. Working Well with Others is Good. » CIO.com: Dearly Departed: Companies and Products That Didn’t Deserve to Die