Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

I've been using DevExpress 's ASPxGridView on a fairly big ASP.Net project for the past few months. When I started using it, I was really frustrated. The documentation was written more like a class reference guide and the tutorials were fairly basic in nature. The real MEAT of the controls didn't seem to be there - all this great potential but where? The Community forums was a great place to look for details but as with many communities, it's hard to find all the answers.  Hopefully, this post will help identify some of the areas where developers may be having some problems: Fixing Edit Forms 1. Edit Form Column Layouts The ASPxGridView lets you do direct "form" editing but when you first do it, the boxes usually go two per line. To resolve this, add                               <SettingsEditing EditFormColumnCount="1" />...

Who would have thought developers fingers could cause crashes? I was working with my VS 2008 ASP.Net application and added some javascript to my default.aspx page when I started to get TypeLibBuilder crashes. WTF? Maybe it was my code --- maybe there was something going on in VS 2008 that I was missing. I shrugged and continued - because after all, when you get weird Windows crashes and you're working on a project, you do the obvious: restart your machine, pray to the Seattle gods and continue on your way. Then I searched for it - Big Problem Solved - No More TypeLibBuilder.exe Crashes! Whoa! Killed DpAgent.exe in my Task Manager and no more errors. Apparently my new MS Fingerprint Reader doesn't like JavaScript! Who knew?

The latest episode of The FoxShow features one of my sessions from Southwest Fox 2008: Profiling and Refactoring, a discussion on how to refactor and how the VFPX Code Analyst can help. This session was given twice : this was the second time around. It was a good discussion including a back and forth on the benefit of comments. I, of course, took the controversial position that all comments should be banned from code except when they explain WHY something was done.

Here's a fun little piece from Southwest Fox 2008 where Ken Levy floats the idea of the Fox Index, a great use of those remaining copies of Visual FoxPro and then of course, Craig Boyd takes it one step further. FoxPro VFP

One of the great things about Southwest Fox was the open discussions that were had almost every minute. Thankfully, some discussions and "discussers" let them be recorded. Here's a discussion Alan Stevens and I had one morning about his sessions on Agility and Ignorance as well as XML handling - a little FoxShow extra. It's short (about 16 minutes) but fun. Enjoy! FoxPro VFP

If you're in the market for working full-time for a vertical market (transportation industry) company with a product family written in VFP 9 with lots of add-on modules (http://www.mtihorizon.com), and a migration path to SQL Server, drop me a line at amacneill @ meltech.com. Will: communicate with customers regarding support problems, develop new solutions based on client needs, enhance product in both VFP and web environments Requirements: VFP 9 experience, enthusiasm, good OOP background, DBF/SQL Nice to have: C#, web development, EDI experience, mobile communication, transportation industry Location: anywhere but need to be available during the regular day (EDT) - we do lots of remote stuff (thank you SourceOffSite !) If interested, drop me a line at amacneill @ meltech.com. FoxPro VFP

A little performance art piece from Southwest Fox...(if it says unavailable, it's still being processed) FoxPro VFP

One of the great sponsor giveaways at Southwest Fox was a 5-user license of SourceGear's Fortress. I've used Vault and Fortress but still stick with Source OffSite as our main development is handled through SourceSafe. Both work great with VFP. But the best part was in the conference bag: Evil Mastermind 2nd Exciting Issue! Best quotes: "You're a sales guy...if anyone understands evil, it's a sales guy" "I want...I want...I want....and I want 5000 t-shirts!" "We've got lots of masterminds using our products...I'm sure at least some of them are a little bit evil...I guess" Kudos to Eric and the SourceGear team for another fun issue and great job, Southwest Fox team (was that you, Rick?) at getting the great swag! SourceGear | Fortress

One of the sessions that I didn't get to attend last night was the "Show us your apps". I think that session would have been really interesting. Many of the attendees I spoke to were fairly shy about their own FoxPro applications. They would talk about it (as it is their "baby" so to speak) but when asked about specific features that they should show, they seemed to shy away. That's unfortunate - because I don't think I've ever seen a single FoxPro app (with the possible exception of some purely framework-based apps) that hasn't included a unique feature or hook. That's one of the reasons I'm particularly excited about Cathy Pountney's session about customization vertical market apps.  Only problem is that it's on right when I've got to get ready to leave. I think I'll have to corner her separately for a quick interview. But back to my point, one my client apps is an application that was ported from DOS and brought kicking...

At Southwest Fox last night , we had a VFPX Meeting (that was also screencast over uStream). The meeting went on for just under 2 hours but a lot of great ideas were thrown about, including ways for others to get involved, without having to code (something that many seemed to like). I recorded it all for the FoxShow and while the audio may be iffy at times, it's a great listen! Enjoy! The FoxShow

While you won't necessarily see every post from Southwest Fox until maybe a few days after the show, you can keep up with it on Twitter. Here's the hash tag and the search link: #swfox - Twitter Search A really great conference with lots of fun stuff going on around here and the first real conf day (aside from pre-cons) is just over.  Prepping for sessions, I only got to see one session which was Alan Steven's Agility. I'm going to put my notes up in a blogpost but I actually took my notes using Mindjet's MindManager and thought it would be cool to take them and also post them here .  (this is a sample of out of the box MindManager exports) More to come...