2nd day at SWFox 2010

On our second day in the SWFox my first session was with Doug Henning who held a session about how to make use of cool controls in your VFP application. Doug showed different tools developed by several VFP users, like the progress-bar balloon tooltip by Carlos Aloatti. Doug also spoke about a cool shortcutmenu with Office 2007 looks. At the end of the road, with so many nice tools available there is no need for anybody anymore to settle for the default – somehow outdated VFP9 look. A modern Windows7 face is within the possibilities.
The next session by Jody Meyer revealed the mystics about CSS development – used to make Webpages. The ¾ hour session was not long enough to make us to fully qualified webprogrammers but she revealed a lot of mystics of this sport.
The last session before lunch was by Bo Durbon. Bo is famous for his extensive GDIPlus knowledge and his class GDIPlusx to enable VFP users to make use of this Windows. Today he revealed and showed us the possibilities to make use of the InternetExplorer.vcx. We were shown how different objects in IE could extend VFP.
After lunch the real VFPO guru Rick Strahl showed us is a very active session how we could extend VFP by calling .NET components. It was good to see what all was possible with .NET in VFP however it was also good to learn that by no means there are reasons to switch to .NET just for the sake of being modern and up to date.
Tamar Granor showed us the importance of the collection object and proved collections have several advantages over array’s. She also showed us a by here developed bug-routine. The use of the default debugger can lead to unwanted results. It is to be expected that her Inspector.app correcting this, will be available shortly on VFPX.
The last session by Christoff Wollenhaupt had a titel which made me expectant : “How the fox is different” . Christoff explained extensively what the differences are between VFP on one side and .NET, C++ on the other. Being a devoted VFP programmer is was good to hear about all the advantages of the fox over the others.