Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

For 10 years now, the Southwest Fox conference has served as a great gathering for FoxPro developers, looking for insight, ideas and inspiration on moving their development applications and skills forward. Over the years, there have been spotlights on moving VFP applications into the cloud, onto mobile, integrate better with .Net and lots of other technologies. While Visual FoxPro isn't receiving internal code updates from Microsoft, Visual FoxPro (or VFPX ) continues to grow into a larger tool in the developer's arsenal. While Thor continues to deliver more power in the actual FoxPro IDE, new interface features grow what FoxPro applications can actually do. But the core of FoxPro (fast and efficient database access) remains - and for all the tools or applications provided with Oracle or SQL Server or Postgres or whatever, VFP still provides the best data access environment that I've ever worked in. That means for developers who still need to deliver solutions, VFP wi...

Doug Hennig: Southwest Fox 2013 Speakers and Sessions Announced Doug's written up some of the sessions he's looking forward to and I have to say the sessions announced for Southwest Fox cover a wide gamut for the FoxPro (and xBase++) developer. (full disclosure: I'm speaking so I'm excited about that too) Like Doug,  I'm very excited about  Eric Selje’s  Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Continuous Integration and VFP When VFPX first came about, Alan Stevens had done some work on an MS Build target for VFP. This never really took off which was too bad. Continuous Integration is so wonderful that once you have it, you will wonder why you didn't do it earlier. It's a great way for ensuring you compile, teaching your team, identifying conflicts and just feeling good about your approach.  We're using it extensively at one of my clients and it really has helped identify the culprits (gulp!) who break code. Hope to see you there

I received an email this morning from Brandon Savage 's newsletter. Brandon's a PHP guru (works at Mozilla) but his newsletter and books have some great overall perspectives for developers of all languages. However, this last one (What's the difference between developers and architects?) kind of rubs me the wrong way. Either that, or I've just missed the natural inflation of job descriptions. (maybe, it's like the change in terminology between Garbage man and Waste Engineer or Secretary and Office Administrator) So maybe it's just me - but I think there's still a big difference between Programmer, Developer and then of course, architect. The key thing here is that every role has a different perspective and every one of those perspectives has value. The original MSF create roles like Product Manager, Program Manager, Developer, Tester, etc - so every concept may pigeon hole people into different roles. But the statements Brandon makes are often distinction...