Yesterday was the last day of the conference, and I’m sorry it’s ended. I learned a lot and met a lot of great Fox developers (who are people too, by the way). As the sessions were winding down, many of us hung out outside the conference rooms chatting about all things Fox (and a little about cars). I spoke for a second time today (materials here), and was able to catch a few other sessions. Here are some of my notes:

GDIPlusX library

Bo spoke on the GDIPlusX Library. After a brief overview and some instructions on how to download and get the System object in memory, he took a moment to discuss how system.prg works. What a great piece of architecture. If you haven’t checked out the GDIPlusX Library, you should at least download it and review the system.prg file (and then all the others too). GDIPlusX looks a lot like the .NET implementation on purpose, and works the same too.

Of course, at the moment, my head is spinning on all the other implementations for this type of architecture (Math, IO, etc.).

Now here’s a great tip. Declared DLLs take precedent over function calls. Therefore, if you name your own function the same name as a declared library, your code won’t run — the library’s code will. Bo showed us how he and his team developed a technique to take advantage of this behavior. When you need a dll function, call a VFP function with the same name that DECLAREs the DLL and then calls it (passing in all relevant parameters). Now the DLL function is in memory, and next time you need it, it will use it instead of the function. This means that you only need to declare your DLLs when needed. It also means that CLEAR DLLS ALL commands won’t kill your app if you need a DLL after that call (by the way, this is something I lost sleep over a while ago when some 3rd party function issued this command). Additionally, you now only DECLARE the DLLs when needed. I think Bo mentioned that this technique was first used by Rick Strahl, but on a smaller scale.

Bo also talked about how the GDIPlusX help is coming along. It looks like we’ll have more help for this library than we’ll ever need. Bo and his team are doing an amazing job with it.

A great resource for GDIPlusX, other than the official CodePlex/VFPX site, is Cesar Chalom’s Blog. Cesar has a lot of examples and is very active on the project.

How to OGLE Your Application

Alen Stevens taught us about OGLE: “Optimized, Generic, Layer, Extensions”. The goals of OGLE apps is to be future proof, data source agnostic, location independent, and .NET accessible. OGLE relies on physical n-Tier development techniques, where XML is passed among layers. Using XML in this way helps applications to be future proof. After the session, I talked with Alan about the architecture and he reiterated the importance of using XML to pass data between layers. We’re also reminded that VFP is a state-of-the-art XML parser — faster and more reliable than other available technologies. Therefore, using XML to pass data back and forth is a natural fit for OGLE.

The presentation was a perfect compliment to the whitepaper Alan created. The slides helped shape out the logic in the paper. Now I’ve got my head around it. He walked through lots of code examples, demonstrating the basics of the architecture. I haven’t used com as a middle tier before, so I was glued to this session. I felt that Alan gave a great overview of the process and now I feel like I’m up to speed. He showed us how to set up COMATTRIB attribues, which specifies type library attributes and values for PEMs. This applies to OLEPUBLIC classes only. You can do things like insert descriptions and read-only attributes. These are exposed and can be read by other technologies.

OGLEing apps seem like a smart design move. The separation and isolation of layers in each tier are more dramatic and defined. Although I missed Alan’s test-driven-development (TDD) session, I got the feeling that OGLE is also quite friendly for TDD as well. Whether using FoxUnit (Alan loves this thing) or if you’re just writing stubs to test apps, the architecture makes it simple.

…

I’ll be sure to recap the entire event after my wife and I get out of the Tennessee mountains on Tuesday. I’ll also be at AFUG Tuesday night.

More on FoxForward over at Kevin’s blog: http://cully.biz/. Alan said he might post too, so check out http://netcave.org/.

Tags: Conference, FoxForward, VFP

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!)

Tags: Conference, FoxForward, VFP

As most of you know, FoxForward begins September 7th, 2007 in Alpharetta GA. The speakers list has long been set and the schedule of talks is now online. This is looking like it is going to be a great event! There are sessions on FoxUnit (see Alan Stevens blog), Cusror Adapters (see David Stevenson’s blog), Web Connection (presented by Stein Goering), n-tier development (Michael Babcock), and custom report controls with Sedna (Bo Durban). I will be speaking on Data Warehousing — giving you an overview of what it takes to build a data warehouse (using VFP). For those of you looking to use VFP with MySQL or MapPoint, then there are sessions for you. I am particularly interested in John Koziol‘s talk on Visual Analysis. Also, Brian Marquis‘ presentation is geared for Foxpro developers looking to add Web 2.0 technologies into their applications (“Fox Trails” not “VFP on Rails”!). And there’s much, much more.

If you can get to the Atlanta area, please make it out! It’s right here.

For more updates, check out Kevin’s blog or visit the FoxForward official website!

Tags: Conference, FoxForward, VFP