After four terrific days breathing only Visual FoxPro, now I think I finally landed on earth again.
The Brazilian VFP conference happens every 2 years in Sao Paulo city, and is organized by Nilton Paulino, owner of FoxTotal, and FoxBrasil Community administrator. This time, we had four great days, from 15-18 of November 2006. In this edition we were more than 130 participants, and the event was a complete success.
DAY 0
The whole first day was a pre-conference presented by Leandro Walfrans, in which he presented and discussed deeply one of his frameworks to create client-server applications. Although I could not attend, I’m sure it was very profitable for the attendees, once people kept discussing deeply the subjects for the next three days.
DAY 1
Fabiano Costa and Nilton Paulino opened the conference, and Fabiano showed one of his creative videos. Basically, he showed in 3 minutes how a developer can make many important tasks working with VFP. Really cool, I hope to translate it to English and share with you as soon as possible.
Walfrans started talking about "VFP’s future, Sedna and the new CTP of SP2". He presented the newest versions of NET4COM and the MY namespace that became available in last October. He explained these tools deeply, showing to the attendees all the new possibilities that Sedna will bring to us. On the final part, he presented the new Upsize Wizard and the DataBase Explorer.
After lunch, our show man, Fabiano Costa, talked about “FOXCEL”. Foxcel is the technique that he created to create EXCEL spreadsheets, using not more than 6 Excel automation commands, to create REALLY complicated spreadsheets. I must confess that he really impressed me with his technique. Basically, he asks his clients to create the desired spreadsheet directly in Excel, with all calculations and formatting desired. After that, he opens this spreadsheet in Excel, and stores in the comments of each cell the VFP code that generates the correspondent value. The whole spreadsheet is processed again by an incredibly simple and succinct VFP routine … and voila ! The main point that he convinced all of us is that we don’t need to be automation experts to create very professional spreadsheets for our clients. I take my hat off to him… I’d give him 11 stars of 10!!! I really hope that he will publish his technique soon, so that the whole community can take benefit of that.
Frederico Tomazetti followed Fabiano with his presentation of “Good practices accessing data with VFP”. Tomazetti showed his techniques for planning databases, and some tools we can use to ease this task. More important than showing some techniques was to hear from him some of his experiences dealing with a great variety of databases in the last 25 years. He answered lots of questions.
DAY 2
The next day started with Fabiano Costa presenting some techniques to create “Web applications with VFP and PHP”. Again he impressed all of us, showing an application working in almost the same way and appearance in the desktop and on the web.
After that, it was my time to present… When I was called, my legs and hands started to tremble… I had never presented anything of VFP before…. And for such an exigent audience! Again I remembered of Kevin Ragsdale’s nightmares and experiences when he presented for FoxForward Fox 2 months ago… And ran to the toilet!!!
My theme was “VFP-X and other community projects”. My goal was to tell people about VFP-X and the great experience I’ve been passing on the last year since I started blogging and sharing some of my techniques. The more I share, the more I learn. I’m so thankful for all this great community for the great help all these fantastic people kindly offered to me. All the suggestions and feedback I receive help me to improve my programming. I tried to motivate people lift off, and start visiting all these terrific blogs, and VFP-X.
In my opinion, a great part of the brazilian developers are very ashamed to show their creations to the rest of the community, because although the vast majority of them can read in English, they think their English is not good, and people would not understand what they could publish. I totally disagree with that. Today we have great tools to help us to fix some spelling, and some good translators too. I know my English is not that good, but I keep writing and having HUGE benefits from all of you.
I showed some of Kevin Ragsdale's and Chan Kok Kiet's VFP promo videos, logos and slogans. I also talked about and showed some of the VFP-X projects. People got really impressed with the projects and some other cool tools and techniques, like Bernard Bout’s “AeroGlass” techniques and Herman Tan’s “OwnerDrawn Menus”. Unfortunately, I could not show all the samples I wanted, although I received more 30 minutes of extra time. People asked: Is that available? Can we use these classes? How stable are Carlos Aloatti’s ctl32 controls? They want to use them all now!!! Specially regarding on Bernard Bout’s techniques people saw that with with VFP and some good ideas, we can do whatever we want!
Pablo Sollar followed me presenting “XML Web Services and working with VFP in other platforms”. Pablo is the author of the free web book “Desenvolvendo Aplicativos para WEB em Visual FoxPro 9.0 com WEB Services” and discussed the usage of WebServices comparing with other techniques.
Next presentation was from Leandro Walfrans with “CursorAdapters – a revolution accessing data”. Although many people already knew this great tool, Walfrans again surprised everybody with his techniques and framework.
Then it was my time again, to present “No limits with GDI+”. I had separated more than 90 examples to show in only 75 minutes! After a not so short introduction about GDI+, and my incredible experience after I joined my gurus Bo Durban and Craig Boyd in the Gdiplus-X project, I started presenting some examples using GDI+. The great majority of the samples used the new classes. My goal was to show people how easy it became for us to deal with this great tool. Some people could not believe that now they can work with the same tool that .NET developers have, and take profit of all the published articles and material on this subject on the web. Every time when I work with this library I get really excited… Intellisense works in a very satisfactory way. You cannot imagine the much I learned after I started to deal with Bo’s and Craig’s code on this library.
Thanks very much Bo !
Thanks very much Craig !
When the time was up, I still did not show 30% of what I had planned… Even with the more 30 minutes that I received, I could not finish showing and giving some explanations on the samples. I left some time to show some techniques provided by Vassilis Aggelakos, that very kindly specially prepared a sample to be presented at this conference. People got really impressed with the great interface and the very inventive GDI+ usage Vassilis applied on his application. Thanks very much Vassilis!
I got really impressed with all the feedback I got with this presentation. Many people came to me bringing some very good ideas. Many of them talked about expanding their applications to deal with specific cases with images with GDI+.
Rafael Lippert followed me, with "Cases of success with VFP", showing a great menu that he created that imitates the Office2003 style. His technique consists of analyzing the MPR generated file and recreating the menu using some GDI+ techniques. This permits to users to use exactly the same menus that were already created, without having to recreate using the class.
Then he showed his application that deals with glass companies. Very interesting technique, working with GDI+ to generate the outputs. Finally he showed another great application he created to optimize the cutting of glasses, using some very hard and extensive calculations, he obtained exceptional results, even better than some known applications. Lots of questions, lots of ideas, Rafael surely opened our minds to many new possibilities. People didn’t want to leave the audience…
What a day!