Boston FoxPro user Group meeting

While in Boston attending Tech-Ed 2006 I had the pleasure of attending the local Visual FoxPro group meeting.

Local Fox Developer Dmitry Litvak picked me up and we went to get Andrew Coats [MS] for an early dinner.

Andrew is a long time Fox Developer who now works for Microsoft as a Developer Evangelist in Sydney, Australia.

As an aside, earlier in the day at lunch time at the Tech-Ed conference, I sat at a table with a couple of Microsoft guys I did not know. They were talking showing their Australian accent. One of them saw the VFP polo I was wearing and commented that I'm the second one he saw that day as Andrew Coates was walking around wearing the exact same VFP 9.0 shirt. I had not seen Andrew yet and I mentioned I was meeting him the same night.

"Oh? At the VFP meeting?"
"Right" I said.

Turns out he knew about it as he works with Andrew at Microsoft Australia. Then he proceeds to tell his friend how Andrew always talks about FoxPro and points out to them when he sees a Fox app on the web.

He then mentioned how he went to a Fox meeting and noticed that "all the people were older, just like a geriatric place, all around 50", he joked. Funny guy. Yeah, like root canal. He was in his twenties and I happen to be 50 myself.

Back to the meeting which took place at the local Microsoft offices in Waltham, MA a suburb of Boston.

The attendance was about 20 people as the organizer joined the VFP and .NET developers in one meeting. Andrew talked mainly about SQL Server Express 2005 (SSE) comparing it to SQL Server (it's basically same but free an self contained) and to MSDE which it replaced.

He did the presentation in a laptop running the current Beta of Windows Vista which pleased the audience as they got a chance to see some of it in action.

As most of the attendees were FoxPro developers, Andrew used Visual FoxPro 9.0 as a front-end showing how to upsize data, then a couple of simple examples of accessing data through remote views.

He fired up Visual Studio 2005 and showed examples of ASP.NET accessing two different data sources, an SSE database (NorthWind that was previously uploaded from VFP) and data from a full SQL Server instance.

The controls on the form were bound through an object, showing the proper way to create 3-Tier architecture, as opposed to the cheesy run-of-the mill samples you see at most presentations were the speaker binds data directly from the UI to the underlying database, therefore creating older 2-Tier designs. To show how you can bind to any object that implements an IEnumerable return he also demonstrated a sample of binding to an XSD data schema of one of the SQL Server tables.

At the end he expertly answered all questions from the lively audience.

Kudos to Andrew for teaching the correct way to create Data Access Layers and proper design and for a great presentation.