Although we do work now for near to 2 years in the same version of VFP I found last week that visiting a DevCon is very worthwhile. I was in Frankfurt last week.

Not only did I get the chance to renew contacts and meet new people, more than that I did get new ideas that made my head nearly explode.

I survived Lisa Slater Nicholls 3 sessions on reporting in VFP9, including one session on the new stuff that will be available in SP2, more than that she showed some neat tricks that can be done in the current version that I did NOT know of.
It did take her three sessions to make my brain sizzle with new ideas and she used the last session to shoot them poor brains out.

Or what about taking metadata to the max as Andy Kramek showed here. I decided to rewrite some of my apps so they will be much easier to ship to various clients. I only change some info in my tables and I have a totally different application with new behavior, no need to recompile the exe.

I also survived Marcia Akins' Session on Best practices on Class Design, she started trowing things at people if they gave a good answer, Candy bars that is, only 10 casualties, including the beamer...

Or what About Doug Henning's session on IntelliSense. He showed some cool tricks on implementing IntelliSense in your apps. That is one thing I can and will most definetely implement in my apps as soon as possible. (quite easy actually).

Then there was the session of Beth Massi on LINQ, although I do see some use for that I still have to find usecases for other stuff (running SQL statements against running processes on a computer makes no sense YET for me.)
Although entirely different stuff from VFP I will consider using .net stuff, especially VB.net
It did spark some ideas indeed.

I can go on for hours on the hot and cool stuff I learned there in the 3 days the DevCon did go on. Actually, it does last longer. OK, I was there for the full 3 days it did take, but generating code, based on the ideas I got there makes the energy of the DevCon stay alive much and much longer. I now already know that I will go there next year as well as to Prague. (I did meet Igor Vit, a very, very nice guy.)

The sessions went from early morning till early morning, although the last session were held in the bar. (mostly till way after 1:00h in the morning.)

99% of my work is done in VFP9. Therefore I dare say that I am quite experienced in using the product. Nonetheless I learned so many new thing during the DevCon in Frankfurt last week that this was most definetely a major boost in my insight on the product.

Whenever possible go and visit one DevCon in your neighborhood, you will find it most definetely worthwhile !!! I DO encourage you to seriously consider this, it will make you a better developer.

Last word as a major THANK YOU RAINER BECKER from the bottom of my heart for making this DevCon possible. You are a fantastic host, and as ever the sessions were great! I'll be there next year most definetely!