Craig Bailey on Microsoft

It’s been a little while since I visited the VFPx site – and boy is it coming along nicely. (For those that don’t know VFPx is the open source add-on community for Visual FoxPro)

I like how they’ve categorised all the projects by Release type: Production, Release Candidate, Beta, Alpha, etc. VFPx is the place to get all the Sedna goodness of course, but there’s also plenty of other useful projects like the ThemedControls and FoxCharts.

The reason I was looking through the site is because I watched Doug Hennig’s Explorer Interfaces video (available from the link on his blog post here – I’ve deliberately not linked to the video itself in case he moves it to YouTube or other location). His video is a little taste of what you can expect at Southwest Fox later this year. And speaking of Southwest Fox (October 16-19), I’m stunned by the lineup of speakers and sessions. Not to mention the rock bottom price. Oh how I wish I could be there.

Having your code name objected to is nothing new. This (possibly hoax) story about Fiji (the island nation) objecting to Microsoft’s use of ‘Fiji’ as a code name is nothing new. Most recently this happened when the Visual FoxPro team were releasing the Sedna Add-ons and received numerous complaints from the inhabitants of Neptune :-)

(via Mary Jo Foley)

TechCrunch went into meltdown with the news. CNN covered it live. And Super Tuesday has been rescheduled to cope with the disruption...

Amazingly though, in what I can only imagine is an embarrassing oversight, there was no press release about it.

In possibly the tiniest launch announcement I've ever seen (you'll need hours to read through this comprehensive overview - NOT), Microsoft has finally (on 25 Jan) released Sedna - the add-on to Visual FoxPro.

Better than nothing I guess :-)

Actually I'm pretty excited about having a play with this later tonight.

Craig Boyd has the details on Sedna being added to VFPx. He also reminds us about the DBi controls that can be downloaded.

Rick Schummer has a discussion of whether SP2 is required (make sure you read the comments as well).

Download Sedna here.

Who'd have thought...?

I'm with Andrew MacNeill on this - where's Sedna? Craig Boyd notes it is imminent. There's been a bit of palava about whether Microsoft should fix SP2 before releasing Sedna. I'm all for getting out Sedna as quickly as possible. Who knows what issues we might have in SP2 that are only highlighted by Sedna? Bring it on.

I have a bit of a record for complaining about something and then having to quickly retract because the very thing I complain about is resolved as soon as I post it - I'm hoping the same thing happens as a  result of this post :-)

Microsoft Visual FoxPro home page is here.

A nice little post from Craig Boyd covering the various Vista progress bar states and how they can be controlled in  Visual FoxPro (VFP).

Long time no see Craig, great to see your brilliance shining again on the blogosphere.

Oh man I wish I coulda been at Southwest Fox - do those crazy kids know how to run a conference!

Doug has the full rundown of Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and Day 4.

Congratulations to the team of Doug, Rick and Tamar on an amazing achievement.

Apparently there was some news about a Visual FoxPro release this week. I searched but couldn't find anything :-). Except this, this, this, this, this, this. (To be fair to myself I did mention it on my link blog here.)

Or perhaps I was getting it confused with this article about salesforce.com's new Visual Force, which David Berland likened to an on-demand version of FoxPro. The article is actually a nice summary of Fox's impact on the PC world - worth a read if you've got a spare minute.

I'm excited that we have Nick Neklioudov in Sydney in mid-October, coming to give us a special Sydney Visual FoxPro User Group presentation.

Click here for Sydney VFP User Group Special Event details

Nick will be presenting a session on using Drag and Drop in Visual FoxPro forms. Drag and Drop is an important usability element of applications, but is often neglected, especially in already existing programs. One of the interesting parts about Nick's session is that he will be showing how to implement Drag & Drop without changing a single line of code in the existing form controls.

If you are a VFP developer in Sydney, please help me spread the word - it is only a little over two weeks away.

Date: Wednesday 17 October 2007

Time: 6:30pm - 8:30pm

Venue: Microsoft, North Ryde, Sydney

(1 Epping Road, North Ryde, Sydney NSW 2113 - view map)

About Nick Neklioudov

Nick Neklioudov, M.Sc., CNA, works as Systems Analyst with CGI Group Inc. in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Programming in all versions of FoxPro/VFP since 1987, in VB.Net since 2003, not counting some other developer tools and environments. Nick received Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award three times.
Nick Neklioudov has over 20 years experience with computers and information technologies, especially in database-oriented programming, object-oriented programming and information systems development.

Click here for Sydney VFP User Group Special Event details

[Questions? Please contact Craig Bailey with any queries.]

Here's another example of how FoxPro gets misunderstood. Thankfully Tod McKenna sheds some light (in the Discuss page).

I've written an article outlining How to use SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) to import Visual FoxPro data into SQL Server.

The article is reasonably basic and covers:

• Using SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio to create the package and manage errors
• Using SQL Server Management Studio to create the Integration Service
• Using SQL Agent job to schedule it
• Gotchas (including UNC mapping, and the VFP OLE DB driver)
• Brief overview of a real world implementation using SSIS
• Brief discussion of SSIS versus VFP Upsizing Wizard

The article is 49 pages long, but don't be alarmed, most of it is screen shots. It is available in Word or PDF format. I've included the Word format in case you want to edit the article, add your own comments, copy stuff out etc.

It is available here (and from my Articles page).