SWFox Day One

Day one of Southwest Fox consisted of forty sessions that started at 8:30 am and ended at 9:30 pm. The organizers do an incredible job creating a schedule and providing lots of great content. Each session is presented twice so all the attendees have an opportunity to see all the sessions that they want to. I am impressed each year at how well everything works.

I spent most of my day talking to the attendees at our booth in the exhibit area. Since this is our third year I have been seeing a lot of familiar faces. The FoxPro community is a very tight knit group and many of the attendees have been coming to this conference for years. It has been great chatting with people that we have met at various FoxPro User Group Meetings over the past year.

I was able to break away from the booth to attend the session on Alaska Xbase++. The presentation was done by  , the chief architect and president of the company. Xbase++ has big plans to support the FoxPro community by adding support for the VFP language to the Xbase++ compiler. This could become another way for FoxPro developers to work with Advantage since Alaska provides a native Advantage Data Driver.

Ken Levy presented a session on Advantage where he discussed the benefits of using Advantage with your FoxPro applications. Ken discussed the benefits of moving to client/server specifically using Advantage. He demonstrated the use of the bran new CloneDBC utility to create an Advantage data dictionary. He then showed accessing the data concurrently from a simple Visual FoxPro application and a Visual Studio application.

Ken also discussed some code samples which were produced by VFP Conversions. There are two samples one is a VFP9 application and the other is a C# application. The C# application uses the Advantage .NET Data provider to access the data concurrently with the native VFP application. You can download these samples using this link.

After the sessions we had a very nice dinner provided by the conference. During the dinner many giveaways were handed out to attendees. After dinner there was one last group of sessions for the hard core conference goers. Still one and a half days left in this year's conference.