Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

What's coming up? Virtual FoxFest is coming up soon (sessions start October 14th). Like last year, the conference is entirely virtual yet includes great breakdown rooms and sessions to add that nice one-on-one feel that you get in person. It's also staggered so you can choose which days you want to attend - October 14th, 20th and 26th. This is great if you can't break away for a consecutive three days. But really, I've gone through the sessions and I see five great sessions that I'm eager to check out. 1. A Decade of Thor (Rick Schummer) Thor has been an extension for Visual FoxPro that many developers swear by, yet many don't know even exists. Visual FoxPro's built-in extensions are great but Jim Nelson's Thor supercharges your IDE. I can't believe it's been ten years - so Rick's session should be able to not just whet your appetite but give you all the reasons you should be using it. 2. VFP C++ compiler.  Last year, we saw DotNetX as well

https://anildash.com/2021/09/11/twenty-is-myth/ Anil Dash has written a post of remembrance every year since September 11th, 2001 (yes, on the day). His blog has lots of other great things on it - but the ONE post I always look for is his post. We were away at DevCon in San Diego that day. I was up early and was able to absorb the news firsthand. I have an affinity to New York for a number of reasons: my sister lived there, we honeymooned there and it is New York. But the days that immediately followed in 2001, I saw the heartbreak of attendees who were waiting to hear from loved ones there. It was an entire surreal experience of being in a city with an military base. Fighter jets flew everywhere while no commercial planes could be seen. I recall the first flight that took off from the airport. But Anil was there in New York that day and his posts have always struck me, providing a personal experience that goes beyond the media recaps and speeches. He notes that this

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/the-new-javascript-typescript-experience-in-vs-2022-preview-3/ The promise noted in this announcement sounds very exciting. Sure, you can do most of this already with VS Code - but encouraging this type of development directly in Visual Studio is awesome. The one thing I would like to see is built-in support for Cypress - my e2e testing tool of choice. ( Https://www.cypress.it ) - which is a great tool for Vue and React apps.

Error handling is an integral part of application development. Unless you are like myself and never release code with bugs :) , the need for clients to tell you what's wrong is important. I've seen a number of error handlers in the past, dating all the way back to Pat Adam's famous FP2ERROR routine (back from 1991). Most systems log their errors and then pick them up as part of a diagnostic push. Unfortunately, reporting these errors back to the developer require some effort by the client. Doug Hennig has introduced a new VFPX project for adding easy error handling and reporting. While it does include a few dependencies, it offers a nice support-centric dialog for clients to report errors. https://doughennig.blogspot.com/2021/07/new-errorhandler-vfpx-project.html If you AREN'T getting automatic feedback from your clients when they get an error, now there's no excuse.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/load-only-the-projects-you-need-with-solution-filters/ While I don't have a hundreds of projects in a solution, our larger application definitely has a few that don't need to be loaded each time (test apps, etc). It's a great feature but not very discoverable - I can see why they needed a blog post for it. Maybe the VS Team can come up with a better way.

Sometimes the Internet is great - you can find exactly what you're looking for, quickly and easily. Other times, it takes you down a rabbit hole of different sites that may provide the right answer but, more often than not, the 90% rule is often true.  So when we decided to consolidate our multiple git repos into a single repo on Azure Devops, I figured this should be relatively easy. Note: it isn't built into git and while the final process isn't that tough to follow, finding the best answer was extremely frustrating and time-consuming. After several wrong paths, I came across this post . This covered the process in great detail - including some safety steps to ensure you don't overwrite incorrect files. I'm finding that sometimes the dev posts on Medium are just as good as StackOverflow but provide the necessary context that may not be available there. I want to note it here as it took a very long time to find that article. The key is the --allow-unrelated-histori