Southwest Fox conference

[StewartUK]

I wanted to draw your attention to the Southwest Fox conference being held October 18 - 21, 2007 in Arizona, USA.

I, and others here, have been in previous years which have been very excellent. It's being this year run by Geek Gatherings LLC, a partnership of Rick Schummer, Doug Hennig, and Tamar Granor so I'm assuming that it will be top-notch quality. And of course, the extra bonus of it being lovely and warm!

Pop over to their website

http://www.swfox.net

and have a look. Might see you there.

Stewart

 

[AndyKr]

I would support Stewart. Not only is SW Fox going to be a GREAT conference (again) this year, it is going to be the ONLY deidicated VFP conference in the US. So unless you are planning to go to Frankfurt in November (see you there!) you should definitely plan to go to SW Fox.

Why bother with conferences? I would propose three main reasons for yoiur consideration (there are many others, not least of which is that it is F_U_N):

[1] Networking.

In our business, as in any other, "what you know" is important, but often "who you know" is at least as important. How can you know someone unless you meet with them, talk with them and spend time with them? In some ways the actual conference sessions are the least important aspect of a conference. It is the opportunity to meet others who live in the same world as you do and who do the same things that you do, to talk with them and discuss common issues and problems that adds significant value.

Of course you also have to make the effort of going and talking to people! I have never understood people who go to a conference, attend the sessions and then disappear back to their hotel room – they are missing the most important part – the chat sessions over lunch, in the lobby, or the bar, or wherever else the VFP crowd are congregating

[2] Broadening Horizons.

We each live our professional lives immersed in the day to day issues with which we are concerned. How often do we take the time out to investigate some new facet of VFP? Or to look at some programming technique or issue for which we have no immediate use? Not very often I would wager. This is the shortcoming that on-line forums and help sites cannot address. They are 'problem oriented' in that when a question is asked, the response is an answer to that question. What you do not get is the answers to unasked questions or general information.

For example, in Prague this year I attended a session given by Alan Griver on "VB Futures". This is something that I would not normally spend time researching, or even reading casually about, but it was an immensely interesting and revealing session and I learned a lot. Will I use it 'today'? No! Is it worth knowing about? Definitely!

[3] Learning New Skills/Approaches

One of the most significant benefits that I see from conferences is the presentation of alternatives. VFP is an immensely rich and powerful language and no-one really knows it all. (There are over 1500 Commands, Functions, Properties, Events and Methods, and probably 10 times that number of variations on them). It is almost an axiom that there are at least two ways (and usually more) of doing anything in VFP. What most of us (including myself) do is learn one and stick with it. At conferences I get a chance to see other approaches to problems, other techniques for using VFP and its tools and other people's solutions to problems.

For example, at Prague last week I was asked by someone whether I thought he should use the BINARY index type for indexes on DELETED() so as to minimize the index size and improve transmission over the network. I had missed the implications of the addition of this new index type in VFP 9.0. So there was something I learned that despite my more than 20 years working with Fox I had never come across before and about which I would never have dreamed of asking on line.


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Andy Kramek
Visual FoxPro MVP

 

[Dan Freeman]

I couldn't agree more! See you there!