An interesting night last night with Andrew Coates demoing Vista, Office 2007 Beta and, oh yeah, Visual FoxPro running on Vista Beta 2.
First thing to note is that Vista looks great, behaved great, is gonna be great, etc
Second thing is that Office 2007 looks great, behaved great, is gonna be great, etc
Third thing is that VFP runs great, looks great (most of the time) and is gonna be no problem running on Vista.
Andrew noted a few gotchas (eg make sure you install the SOAP Toolkit after installing VFP on Vista otherwise you’ll MSXML4 missing errors), but by and large it all rang fine, straight ‘out of the box’. We went through the VFP samples and they all worked fine (the only issue was a GROUP BY clause missing in one of the sample – but hey that’s a samples issue with SET ENGINE BEHAVOUR not a Vista compatability one).
Feature of the night was the Timezones feature in Outlook 2007 – reason to upgrade for that alone me thinks.
Time was running out, so I only skimmed through my presentation (Promoting VFP to the Wider Community) – but the overview notes are available from my articles page if anyone is interested:
Also, here’s a list of links for people after a quick guide to getting the latest news on VFP:
Interestingly the majority of UG attendees last night indicated they don’t read blogs. The comment was they found little value in them. I wasn’t sure what to say in response…
I hope that you impressed the power of blogs to the attendees.
Bit of a head in the sand attitude – isn’t that what VFP developers have been fighting against for years?
I hope that you impressed the power of blogs to the attendees.Bit of a head in the sand attitude – isn’t that what VFP developers have been fighting against for years?
But also about the blogs, the issue is signal vs. noise.
If all the VFP blogs do is talk about how we have to promote VFP, then it gets a bit winded every now and then.
The BIGGER issue to me would be “do they read FoxCentral?” – which is integrated directly into the UI.
The reason I say that is that if they DO read FoxCentral, then it would seem to me that NOW would be an ideal time to build an RSS Task Pane where VFP bloggers could “register” and thus be aggregated on there and then displayed. Maybe a grand OPML of all the VFP bloggers so that this information would be accessible to them.
The signal vs. noise issue again presents itself.
For example, do you subscribe to Rick Strahl, an extremely prolific and detailed blogger, but whose VFP content is very scarce although still important?
What about my blog – where I flip between a variety of different topics not all of which relate to FoxPro?
So the big question to me at any rate is do they read FoxCentral and if so, maybe the idea should be to put these types of announcements directly up there as well as in the blog community.
Just a thought.
But also about the blogs, the issue is signal vs. noise.If all the VFP blogs do is talk about how we have to promote VFP, then it gets a bit winded every now and then.The BIGGER issue to me would be “do they read FoxCentral?” – which is integrated directly into the UI.The reason I say that is that if they DO read FoxCentral, then it would seem to me that NOW would be an ideal time to build an RSS Task Pane where VFP bloggers could “register” and thus be aggregated on there and then displayed. Maybe a grand OPML of all the VFP bloggers so that this information would be accessible to them.The signal vs. noise issue again presents itself. For example, do you subscribe to Rick Strahl, an extremely prolific and detailed blogger, but whose VFP content is very scarce although still important?What about my blog – where I flip between a variety of different topics not all of which relate to FoxPro? So the big question to me at any rate is do they read FoxCentral and if so, maybe the idea should be to put these types of announcements directly up there as well as in the blog community.Just a thought.
I can see your point.
Bing able to hook into FoxCentral would be nice.
With an rss aggregator (I use FeedDemon) however, you can easily scan through new entries and ignore ones that don’t concern you. I don’t really find that I am wasting too much time reading stuff I don’t care about.
If I was checking sites directly it would be too distracting and I can see how people would give up on it.
I can see your point. Bing able to hook into FoxCentral would be nice.With an rss aggregator (I use FeedDemon) however, you can easily scan through new entries and ignore ones that don’t concern you. I don’t really find that I am wasting too much time reading stuff I don’t care about.If I was checking sites directly it would be too distracting and I can see how people would give up on it.
I agree with all your comments. I agree that we need to provide a high signal to noise ratio, but I guess “one man’s signal is another man’s noise”.
So we need to be always checking our own balances – are we spending too much time on one particular activity (eg promotion).
The great thing about blogs is that each person has their own style (eg Rick and Calvin are very technical), whilst others are more news or opinion oriented, and others are concerned with promotion, and even a few are only interested in criticism (although I haven’t seen much from those for a few months now)… :-)
I agree with all your comments. I agree that we need to provide a high signal to noise ratio, but I guess “one man’s signal is another man’s noise”.So we need to be always checking our own balances – are we spending too much time on one particular activity (eg promotion). The great thing about blogs is that each person has their own style (eg Rick and Calvin are very technical), whilst others are more news or opinion oriented, and others are concerned with promotion, and even a few are only interested in criticism (although I haven’t seen much from those for a few months now)… :-)