Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Sign Up for Free Issues of CoDe Focus Magazine!

Every so often, we produce special issues of CoDe Magazine that focus in on a specific topic. We call these special issues CoDe Focus Magazines.

These magazines are distributed at special events such as conferences or product launches. We generally distribute them free of charge to our subscribers and additional mailing lists. If you are interested in receiving such free magazines, click the link below. (Regardless if you are a current subscriber or not! Everyone qualifies for a free issue!)

Click here to be added to the list!

There are several issues planned at this point. One that will ship fairly soon targets Tablet PC and Mobile PC Development. There is also a very good chance that we will produce another Visual FoxPro Focus issue. The link above will allow you to sign up for those issues and also for issues beyond that. This will give us a good idea of what topics we should be tackling first and how much interest there is in VFP content. So make sure you tell us about as many of your interests as possible.

Feel free to pass this on to your friends...

Tuesday, August 16, 2005
PDC 2005 is Sold Out!

As far as Fox conferences go, the pickings have been pretty slim so far this year. DevCon (the VFP industry event in past years) was disappointingly small. DevTeach Montreal (the conference we co-sponsored through CoDe Magazine) has probably had the most VFP content of any conference so far this year (with the possible exception of DevCon Prague). Southwest Fox seems to be promising for pure VFP developers.

For .NET conferences on the other hand, this has been a pretty interesting year so far. The ones in the spring had been very well attended. MEDC was good. DevConnections (www.devconnections.com) was good. TechEd was sold out. Our DevTeach event was well attended.

And the conference that has really big news has not even happened yet! And if you are not signed up already, then it is too late now, because PCD05 is now sold out! (In case you are not familiar with PDC: PDC stands for "Professional Developer Conference" and is the industry event for MS developers overall... think of what DevCon was for VFP years ago and you kinda know what PDC is like, except that its 10,000 people and everything is on a very large scale and very professionally done...). PDC is def. the event for developers to attend this year, and if you missed it, I encourage you to consider it in the future.

This is pretty amazing. I have seen a few sold-out conferences before, but this year seems to be a particularly good conference year. Not too surprising I guess when one considers the leap in technology we are all about to make with Windows Vista (Longhorn) and WinFX. Nevertheless, this sort of logic has not always lead to good event attendance. Perhaps this is also a good sign for the IT industry as a whole? I hope so...

Saturday, August 13, 2005
Is .NET Adoption for VFP and other Win32 Developers the next Y2K?

I had an interesting conversation with a customer recently. I can not name names, but it is a sizable shop who uses various technologies internally for their enterprise infrastructure, including Visual FoxPro. They are in the process of migrating their system from Win32 to the Managed Platform. The project is scheduled to take several years altoghether.

The goal of the project is to stay reasonably up to date with the utilized infrastructure. In particular, security and scalability are taken in consideration. They are also interested in making sure their system can take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies over the next 5 to 10 years. This means gradual migration of various systems, a lot of which are currently based (at least in part) on Visual FoxPro. The main goal is not to abandon a certain language or technology. The goal isn't even to adopt a specific new language (such as C# or VB). The choice of language and technology is made for each individual sub-project. The only global goal is to have systems that run exclusively on the managed platform within about 5 years, without any legacy Win32 code.

The customer made an interesting remark the about the situation: "We are treating the .NET adoption process as a new Y2K problem" he said, " and we want to start now and work on it as a high priority project, but with enough time allocated to [the project], so we can complete it within the next 4 to 5 years. The expectation is to complete the process as successful and painless as we completed our Y2K migration. Giving ourselves enough time and treating it seriously was the key to success then, and we are sure it will be the key to success now.".

I have not thought about .NET Adoption as the equivalent of the Y2K problem, but in a way, he has a good point...