SW Fox 2009 Sunday

Sunday rolled around, and I couldn’t believe it was already the last day of the conference.  Sleep deprivation was starting to set in, and I had more sleep than most.  Still, I wasn’t about to miss any sessions.

VFP and MySQL: Case Study for Remote Data
Rick Schummer

For the purposes of this session, “Remote Data” meant using a database server that resided anywhere, on a local server or out on the internet.  Rick started off with some client/server basics and the various ways you can access remote data from VFP.  It’s common knowledge that SQL Passthrough is the fastest method for accessing remote data, or is it?  Rick showed that in some cases, remote views can actually be faster.  It depends on your scenario, and as VFP has improved, statements about performance that were true in previous versions may no longer be true.  So, you should test performance for yourself, rather than making assumptions based on past results or what you heard from someone else.

Rick then demonstrated connecting to a MySQL server hosted on GoDaddy.com for his site blameitonrick.com.  Even through a slow connection at the conference, performance was quite good.  An upsizing wizard for MySQL is available called Stru2MySQL_2.

Developing and Extending the Visual FoxPro Grid Object
Jody Meyer

Jody is one of the excellent people I met at Southwest Fox this year.  This was Jody’s first time speaking at a Fox conference, and she did a great job.  Her grid class is awesome, or “full of awesome” because nowadays awesome is apparently measured in quantity (get off my lawn!).  Anyway, it’s good.  Not only does is make building grids a snap at development time, but you can give it to your customers to add/remove columns, sort, filter, export, slice, dice, and do pretty much anything you can do with a grid.  No more waiting for the next release to add a column to the grid.  They can do it right now.  Sweet.

Practical Uses for GDIPlusX
Doug Hennig

Being the last regular session of the conference, I was hoping to see some cool stuff to keep me awake.  Doug did not disappoint.  After a brief introduction to GDIPlusX, Doug demonstrated several practical things you can use it for: scaling/rotating images, properly measuring text width/height, creating images from text and adding effects (shadows, etc.), fully justified text in reports, gradients, lightboxes, screenshots, etc.

Closing Session
Tamar Granor, Doug Hennig, Rick Schummer

The closing session is usually brief at Southwest Fox.  There were some giveaways and Southwest Fox 2010 was announced.  One of the slides was titled “Fun, Fun, Fun”, and Doug said this was the funnest conference ever.  For me, that was definitely true, and others have said the same thing.  That is in no small part because the Feltman’s opened their suite to attendees, so special thanks to Mike and Toni for doing that.

The party was by no means over.  The speaker dinner was at room 709, after which attendees started to cycle in.  Since I didn’t have an early flight, I hung out until about 3:00 AM.  Overall, I had a great time this year.  The Fox community is a tight-knit group, but it seems even tighter after this conference.  I can’t wait until next year!

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