Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

If you haven't seen it, Dilbert for 3/24 sums up the way some unit testing zealots like to approach unit testing. Dilbert comic strip for 03/24/2011 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.

Doug Hennig: Southwest Fox 2011 Call For Speakers Southwest Fox is gearing up for the 2011 conference season by issuing an open call to speakers. Go to the  Speakers  page for details. As with last year, they are looking for a wide variety of topics from core VFP, extending VFP, new technologies and becoming better developers.  This year's SW Fox is  October 26-29, 2011 SanTan Elegante Conference & Reception Center/Legado Hotel Gilbert, AZ Session proposals are due by March 28.

iPad 2 was announced yesterday and the business and technology world (and mainstream media who bends over backwards for Steve Jobs) stopped and gazed at the double rainbow that is Apple. Foley had an interesting question : Discussion on: Does Apple's iPad 2 further dent Microsoft's iPad compete plans? | ZDNet I responded there but I thought I would take the opportunity to drill down a bit further. First, Microsoft should stop trying to be a hardware maker. Their expertise is in software - so they should attempt to provide the BEST applications available in the App Store, even out-doing Apple. Microsoft's forays into hardware with the exception of the xBox have been fairly laughable - not many people recommend their webcams or mice without offering just as good alternatives. Imagine what would happen if Microsoft actually GAVE businesses a reason to buy iPads or other tablets? Because Microsoft felt that their focus should be on the software - the BUSINESS software. Where i...

Saw a tweet come through on SW Fox - the dates have been booked with Southwest Fox 2011 on from October 26th-29th with a post-con going through to the 30th. Twitter / SWFox Conference: Southwest Fox 2011 is offi ... It doesn't look like the main SW Fox site has been updated yet but I'm sure it will be shortly. FoxPro VFP

Ken Levy has an interesting post up on his MashupX site since early last month. Ken Levy's Blog _ MashupX Visual FoxPro Strategy at Microsoft The post goes into some fascinating details as to the history of Visual FoxPro at Microsoft. Most of it is well-known or obvious (making VFP.Net would break backward compatibility - which is what MS did with VB.Net as well) I guess more details can be shared now - when VFP 9 was released, " the amount of sales for all versions of VFP combined annually was less revenue than Microsoft sales of Visual Studio in only one day" It would be interesting to know however if some of those companies who were out there working on a VFP-like language in .Net were "persuaded" to stop their efforts, as some have suggested in various forums. Well worth the read. The FoxPro community is what keeps VFP alive (thanks to VFPX and other initiatives) - and there were some members of that community inside of Microsoft at one point. As he n...

Love it or hate it, XML is everywhere and for data and objects, it can be extremely useful. On one of my last projects, a colleague introduced me to the useful XSD2Code project, which creates a .Net object from an XSD. This made it easy for him to build a structure that could be compiled into code to ensure everyone followed the same structure. This is extremely valuable if someone gives you an XSD as a format to write to and you want to populate it using an object. In a more recent project, we needed to share details from a component with another calling application via a web service. Enter XMLSerializer, the .Net equivalent of taking an object and dumping it into XML. Dim s As XmlSerializer = New XmlSerializer(Object) Dim w As New StringWriter() s.Serialize(w, Object) return w.tostring Sounds great, right? It was for a short time, but as the object got bigger, it contained more collections and references to other objects. Eventually, the Serialize method took up 100%...

Here's an innovative way to show your customers where certain features are at in the development cycle. FreeAgent Depot — A furtive glance behind the wizard's curtain How well do you communicate with your clients about upcoming features?