Well, not my Mustang, Hertz’… actually. When the clerk behind the counter asked, “Do you want the Nissan Sentra or the Ford Mus…”, I interrupted: “Give me the Ford! Yup. I want the Mustang”. Not that I have something against a Nissan, but come on… Ok, sorry for the digression.

So far I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Kevin Cully, Dave Bernard, Edward Leafe, Mike Babcock, Garrett Fitzgerald, Bo Durban, and others. Today, I attended track B, seeing two presentations after the meet-and-greet. I didn’t hang out too long after day 1 though, mainly because I needed to go home and write my presentation (just kidding).

Instrumenting VFP

In the first session, Dave Bernard talked about Instrumenting VFP. Like logging application performance, diagnostics, or errors, instrumentation gives you a look into your application. Dave called it “Application visibility”. With it, you can track behaviors, and do a lot of interesting things, like examining mouse clicks (the user swears they didn’t press ‘delete’, but our instrumentation says otherwise); performance bottlenecks (that SQL statement used to run good, what happened?); and even user actions to the point of fine tuning navigation (if users constantly want point D, but are forced through A, B, and C, there might be an opportunity for a shortcut).

Dave talked about how the Coverage Profiler, Error Messages, and Asserts are reactive and not proactive. Instrumentation is proactive. Instrumentation allows you to call your user as soon as they get an error. It allows you to measure function performance over time. Sounds a lot like 80/20 analysis! This technique allows you to refactor code as often as needed throughout the life cycle of a product, without involving the customer.

In my session, I talk about some similar techniques for logging ETL performance in VFP. I didn’t call it instrumentation, in fact, I just called it ‘logging’ for a lack of a better term. Now, I have something to call it! Thanks Dave!

Web Connections 5.x

Stein went though some of the new features that can be seen in Web Connections 5.x. Rick, as expected, has given us some great improvements and new features that will prove to be quite useful for those using WebConnect. I’m not currently a WebConnect user, but wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Bottom line? Rick is a brilliant developer, and his application gets an A+ (in my book).

Stein had a good presentation and was able to get the finer points across to a variety of users (some people in the room were not doing any web development, while others were experienced Web Connect users). Stein showed us some of the WYSIWYG features built into the Visual Studio editor that Rick implemented. We also got to peek at some of the new AJAX functionality. Nice job, Stein, and great framework Rick!

Day one went by pretty quick.

On to day 2! (And back into the Mustang!)