What's new in the Visual FoxPro Community

In this episode on the FoxShow, we talk with Rick Borup (of Information Technology Associates) on his upcoming session and pre-con at Southwest Fox 2010.

The second early bird deadline for the West Wind Web Connection training in Gilbert, Arizona before the Southwest Fox conference is expiring tomorrow (Sept 1st), but we're extending the deadline by a couple of days until the 5ht. If you plan on attending take advantage of the lower price before the rate goes up.The training covers beginning Web Connection concepts all the way up to intermediate to advanced topics in Web development with version 5.0 and the Web Control Framework.

There is still time before September 1st to get in on our Early-Bird Registration for Southwest Fox 2010! The Early-Bird discount saves you $50 over our regular conference registration. Amazing speakers, fantastic sessions, and off-the-chart networking opportunities. Registration details are found at http://swfox.net/registration.aspx. Register today!

We've released version 1.6 of the West Wind Web & AJAX Toolkit for ASP.NET. The toolkit provides a host of utility and AJAX functionality for Web applications as well general utilities for .NET applications in general. Version 1.6 primarily updates the Toolkit's .NET version to 4.0 and provides VS 2010 projects for the full solution. There's also a new Entity Framework business object wrapper included in the Business Objects project. There is also improved support for REST/POX JSON service returns that don't rely on custom request formatting. The toolkit is free for non-commercial use and liberally licensed for commercial use.

In this episode on the FoxShow, we talk with Toni Feltman (of F1 Technologies) on her upcoming sessions at Southwest Fox.

Two great subjects have surfaced for Chicago FUDG: Marc Temkin will elucidate the hows and why of LINQ -- not just the version that looks like SQL in reverse but the less well known method code that compresses the syntax and incrementally adds on phrases of query specifics. To get an introduction to Linq from the standard flavor to the exotic, check Marc out. Patrick OHara will show how he produces charts with SQL Server Reporting Services Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at 5:30pm, 200 S. Wacker Drive Suite 1500 (Tech Nexus). Here is the RSVP link: http://j.mp/dxqK1K

This year's Southwest Fox conference is moving to a new location and the Web Connection training event prior to the conference is going to move to the same new location at the SanTan Elegante and Legado Hotel in Gilbert Arizona. For those of you that have previously made reservations for the training at the Arizona Golf Resort you'll probably want to move your reservations to the new hotel. Web Connection training provides an introduction to building Web Applications with Web Connection 5.0 providing an intense overview of the functionality available in the Web Connection framework for building interactive Web applications with Visual FoxPro.

For the last three years, we have held Southwest Fox at the Arizona Golf Resort and Conference Center. Until recently we expected this would be true for Southwest Fox 2010 as well. Due to a change in the ownership of the Arizona Golf Resort, we have made the difficult decision to relocate. We are happy to announce Southwest Fox 2010 is packing up and moving a little south to the new SanTan Elegante Conference & Reception Center and Legado Hotel in Gilbert, Arizona. More details here: SanTan Elegante Conference & Reception Center and Legado Hotel in Gilbert, Arizona Early-bird registration ends August 30th so beat the rush and register today!

Oak Leaf Enterprises announces the early bird special for our latest .NET 4 for VFP Developers ON-LINE Training Class, August 9-11, 2010, 11am-5pm Eastern has been extended to August 2, 2010. This live, online training class has been completely updated to include information on the new Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 technologies such as the Microsoft Entity Framework 2, and Silverlight 4. We are now using GoToMeeting's Voice-Over-IP technology so there is no longer a long-distance phone call charge when attending the class! It is taught by Kevin McNeish, author of the book .NET for Visual FoxPro Developers, a Microsoft .NET MVP for the past seven years, and an internationally popular INETA speaker. This class has helped many VFP developers climb the .NET learning curve and gain confidence in building well-designed Windows and Web applications in .NET. The class is just $499 with our early bird special which is good through August 2, 2010. The entire class is recorded using Camtasia for your later review! Just go to our home page (http://www.oakleafsd.com) and click on the Training link.

We extended the early bird registration deadline for the Web Connection Training at Southwest Fox October 13 & 14 for another 5 days. Register early and save $100.

The Philadelphia VFP User Group will meet on Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 7 PM. We now meet at Valley Forge Pension Management, 550 Township Line Road, Suite 300, Blue Bell, PA 19422. As always, feel free to come as early at 6:30 and bring dinner. This month, we begin Southwest Fox previews with Tamar E. Granor speaking on "Collections--Managing Data the Object-Oriented Way." When the collection base class was added to VFP 8, it gave us the opportunity to make our applications look more like those in other object-oriented languages. Collections let us manage groups of related objects through a straightforward interface, and avoid the peculiarities of working with arrays in VFP. In this session, we'll cover the basics of using collections, the reasons why they're better than arrays, and show how they improve object models. We'll also consider the weaknesses of collections in VFP and talk about workarounds.