What's new in the Visual FoxPro Community

The FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award honors those individuals who have contributed a great deal to the FoxPro community over the years. See http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~FoxProCommunityLifetimeAchievementAward~VFP for previous award recipients. These recipients wish to continue the award and have created a committee to select a recipient for 2012. The committee consists of all 11 living previous recipients, Alan Griver (yag), and Sergey Berezniker representing the FoxPro community. To submit your nominations for the 2012 recipients, please email Doug Hennig (dhennig@stonefield.com) by June 15, 2012.

Our May 8th meeting will feature Don Higgins -- one of the most successful VFP developers anywhere. Meet at 5:30 on the 15th floor of 200 S Wacker (Tech Nexus). Don wil go over ActiveVFP and how to make VFP work easily on the web. There will be samples of simple web programming, and even some Javascript examples. You don't want to miss this one!

Today is one of those big days here at Geek Gatherings because we officially announce the speakers and sessions for Southwest Fox 2012. All the details can be found on the Speakers page. We?re glad to welcome back a couple of speakers who haven?t been to Southwest Fox in a long time: Rod Paddock and Kevin McNeish. And of course Cathy Knight, Kevin Cully, and Rick Strahl, who didn?t speak at the conference last year. Returning from last year are Menachem Bazian, Steve Bodnar, Rick Borup, Tamar Granor, Doug Hennig, Rick Schummer, Eric Selje, Tuvia Vinitsky, and Christof Wollenhaupt. We hope to see everyone in Gilbert in October.

West Wind Technologies is hosting West Wind Web Connection training with Rick Strahl prior to the Southwest Fox Conference again in Arizona this year. Training will be held on October 17th and 18th at the conference hotel immediately preceeding the Southwest Fox conference. We've just updated the information for the conference including session scheduling and topics covered. Focus is on the new features in the Web Connection Web Control Framework and building an application from start to finish. The training applies to Web Connection developers of all levels provides best practices and lots of practical how to tips and tricks in working with Web Connection. If you're just starting you can learn from the ground up and if you're a seasoned Web Connection developer you can take home best practices approaches and tricks for Web Connection and Web Development in general. Sign up early and save money by taking advantage of our early bird signup options.

April's meeting will feature longtime member Jack Smith speaking about his experience getting going with node.js. We look forward to hearing about this new alternative in server side scripting and how he uses it. We'll have our usual Q&A as well, and social time afterwards. April 17th, 2012 5:30pm Geeks and Gurus, Inc. Madison Division 1308 Spring Street, Lower Office Madison WI

The Philadelphia Visual FoxPro User Group will meet Tuesday, April 10. Jim Connolly and Steven McCann will present the work they?re doing with West Wind Web Connect for Volpe Express Trucking. They created a customer interface for rating, tracking and access to accounts receivable. They also created access for the employees to allow access of the tracking of the deliveries and the drivers. They interface with Google APIs to allow tracking and to calculate distances between stops. They use XFRX to present reports on the Web site.

West Wind Technologies has released version 5.62 of their Web Development framework for Visual FoxPro. Web Connecton makes it easy to build Web, RIA and distributed applications with Visual FoxPro using pure Foxo code within the Visual FoxPro IDE while optionally supporting design time integration with Visual Studio. Version 5.62 is mostly a maintenance release with many small bug fixes and performance improvements, but it also adds a handful of useful new features and works around some limitations of existing functionality. As always Web Connection 5.62 is available as shareware to try for free and it's a free update for registered users of version 5.50 and higher.

Just a reminder that session proposals for Southwest Fox 2012 are due by 8 AM EDT this Friday, March 23. If you're interested in speaking, please download the Call for Speakers and the proposal application from http://www.swfox.net/CallForSpeakers.aspx. We look forward to hearing from you.

Fox developers are spending more and more time in SQL Server Management Studio to handle their back-end database work. But how well do we really know this seemingly simple tool? There's a lot more than just entering queries and editing stored procedures, and we'll take a look at them in March's meeting. We'll have our usual Q&A session, and all members are welcome to show any cool stuff they're working on. Thanks to PluralSight for another month of sponsorship! 5:30 pm, 3/20/2012 Geeks and Gurus Wisconsin Headquarters 1308 Spring St. Madison, WI 53715