Google+ mentions make their way to Blogger

Now, Blogger users can put a "+" before a person's name, and have a link to their Google+ profile automatically included in their post.

Google's Blogger platform now comes with a way for writers to link to a friend or company's Google+ page.

When typing out a post in Blogger, users can now input a "+" before a person's or brand's name. Upon choosing the right profile, a link will be displayed in the published post, allowing readers to go to the subject's Google+ page or profile. Hovering the mouse over the link displays a card showing a profile picture and a little more information on the person or brand.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57560276-93/google-mentions-make-their-way-to-blogger/

Microsoft Retiring Support for WinXP SP2 in a Year

Microsoft will retire support for Windows XP Service Pack 2 one year from today. This does not mean Microsoft will stop supporting XP! What it means  is that it will not longer support SP2. After Patch Tuesday, July 13, 2010 you will have to have SP3 installed in order to get updates for Windows XP. If a vulnerability is found in SP2 that is not in SP3, it will not be patched.

We have also reached the end of the line for Windows XP service packs: After SP3 no new service packs are planned. Microsoft will not end support for Windows XP itself for almost 4 more years as Extended Support is scheduled to end on April 8, 2014.

Via PCMag

Visual FoxPro 9 SP2 Hotfix Released

Great news! (about time!)

Post by Rick Schummer [MVP]:

Microsoft has released a hotfix to the most serious Report Designer bug in VFP 9 SP2. You can read about the fix in the Microsoft KnowledgeBase article #968409, titled "FIX: The group header of a data grouping is not printed at the top of each page as expected after you install Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0 Service Pack 2". You can read about all the details on Cathy Pountney's and Rick Schummer's blog post on the topic.

Glad to hear it. Thanks Rick for the great news!

ISEXP : error -6264: A record in the Property table is using string ID 'ID_STRING1' for column 'Value' but this string is blank...

I have not used InstallShield Express in a long while. I was asked to prepare a utility at work to send to one of our clients. This was done in VFP (just one stand-alone screen with a few procedures).

I fired-up IS-Express, which I had not used in over a year as I've been doing mostly ASP.NET work, and the Build process came up with this error.

I filled all the empty lines I could find but could not find STRING1.

A Google search for the error pointed to a blog entry by Juan Calcagno, a fellow VFP developer. I did the Export to TXT function as he explained and followed the first commentator's post.

Then got another error:
"Internal Error 2855, SetupType, RadioGroup"

This one I solved from another google search to the InstallSite Forum.

Problem solved.

Hug a developer today!

(YouTube Link)

Happy 150th Birthday Natural Selection!

On 1 July 1858, 150 years ago today, the idea of natural selection was first presented to the public in a reading of Darwin's and Wallace's papers at the Linnean Society of London.

The Beagle Project Blog has a nice writeup on it.

I am a proud owner of a copy of Darwin's seminal book "On the Origin of Species" (not a signed copy of course), where he introduced the idea that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection.

I have also read his "The Voyage of the Beagle", a wonderful book where he recounts his travels aboard the Beagle, having visited in part my birth country of Argentina.

Full Justified texts in reports with GdiPlusX

Cesar has a great post with examples, code and screenshots, of how to do reporting in VFPwith text justification using GdiPlusX. Well done!

(Via Foxite)

Firefox 3 releasing June 17

Firefox 3 is coming out this week, if all goes well. They are even preparing for a Guinness World Record on Download Day.

Field Guide to Firefox 3

Everything You Need To Know About Firefox 3

The Fox Team delivers! VFP SP2 Help file fix is out!

As noted by Rick Schummer, the VFP9 SP2 help file fix is available. It was promised by YAG at the MVP Summit in Redmond last week. Thanks guys!

Back from the MVP Summit

Just came back from Seattle and Redmond where I attended the Microsoft 2008 MVP Summit, and event by invitation where MVPs get together and get to talk to the development teams and Microsoft management.

I had a great time and had the pleasure to meet some old friends and colleagues. One thing I wanted to talk about is how, even though the Fox Team is not there anymore, as their members have moved on to other projects within the company, they still are the Fox Team and came to talk to us and discuss the issues with the Fox. I wanted to write about this but Rick Schummer did an excellent job and put it better that I could.

FoxPro videos on YouTube!

Andrew McNeil found this 1990 promotional video from Fox Software. I had never seen this one before. It surely brings back memories and old faces. Nicely done Andy!

While looking at the offerings in YouTube I also found this short one from our Fox MVP meeting intro in 2007, by Craig Bailey. It turns out I'm in YouTube now! Thanks Craig!

FoxTalk is dead. FoxRockX is alive!

Maybe a little late to the info but important nonetheless. The German Foxpro Group (DFPUG), a dedicated group of FoxPro professionals, including several VFP conference speakers and MVPs, have started a new magazine, taking over from FoxTalk and FoxPro Advisor. They offer a bimonthly edition online for subscribers, (with optional print subscription also available). All subscribers get access to FoxTalk's archives too.

This is great news for FoxPro developers world-wide. FoxPro is still a vibrant and powerful programming language, with new additions like Microsoft's SEDNA project and the comunnity-developed additions of VFPx.

Well done, and congratulations to Rainer Becker and his dedicated team.

Sedna released!

Microsoft has released the Sedna components for Visual FoxPro. Sedna is a collection of libraries, samples and add-ons to Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP2.

More details in the postings from Craig and Rick.

You can download the add-on components directly from Microsoft.

A couple of software development gems

A couple of posts caught my eye as very useful this week. One is Doug pointing us to John Robbin's Code signing in Vista, cheaper and easier than you thought. I don't do apps for Vista as we are still in XP at work but I use Vista at home and the "an unidentified program wants access to your computer" message gets old fast and it does look a tad unprofessional.

The other one is "Updated ASP.NET wwCaptcha Control on the WebLog" by Rick Strahl. Quick an easy way to add CAPTCHAs to your webpage.

Coding Horror: Please Don't Steal My Focus

Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror a has a good post on software that steals your focus. Talk about nasty! Besides being very annoying and cutting productivity, it is potentially dangerous as he attests.

I love this comment by Jack:

We don't need no pop-up windows,
We don't need no modal box,
No focus-stealing bad behaviour,
Coders leave my apps alone,
Hey! Coders! Leave my apps alone.

Whatever happenned to instaling updates that don't require an immediate reboot? Microsoft should learn from this.

Article: What’s Ailing ASP.NET Web Forms?

Rick Strahl [MS MVP] has written an outstanding article for CoDe Magazine (What’s Ailing ASP.NET Web Forms?). It explains his views on the pros and cons of the current MS ASP.NET technology and it has the best description I've seen so far of Microsoft's upcoming ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) paradigm. An excellent read.

Steps to Uninstall VS 2008 Beta2 before installing VS 2008 RTM

I downloaded VS 2008 Professional last night. It took about three hours and went smoothly. Burned it to a DVD early this morning before leaving for work, so I did not have enough time to install. That comes next.

Scott Guthrie has published a good set of instructions on how to Uninstall VS 2008 Beta2 before installing the VS 2008 Final Release.

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 today! You can download it if you have an MSDN subscription, else you can download a 90-day free trial.

If you want to use the free Visual Studio 2008 Express editions (which are much smaller and totally free), you can download them here.

If all you want is the .NET Framework 3.5, you can download it here.

See Scott Guthrie's post for details.

Todd on VFP and SQL Server scripts

Todd McKenna has a good blog post titled Use .sql Files with SQLEXEC for Better Script Management showing how to decouple your middleware code from your database in your data access layer. Namely he shows an example on going from this:

SQLEXEC(lnConnHand,'SELECT * FROM Customer')

to this:

SQLEXEC(lnConnHand,FILETOSTR("c:\sqlserver2005\script1.sql"))

This is a very good idea, similar to using the ExecScript() function in VFP but applying it to SQL Server and getting the queries from script files. Of course, you could use Stored Procedures which are precompiled and optimized in SQL Server but Todd's idea makes for simple decoupling and portability. What you have to watch for (as is also with ExecScript) is security. If you read script files from disk, anybody could change them and supply malicious scripts. One possible answer is to read them from Memo fields instead, where you have a little more security control (but not much unless you encrypt them). In short, they do not replace Stored Procedures for security and speed, but they are very flexible and very handy.

Visual FoxPro SP2 released!

Microsoft released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Visual FoxPro 9.0 yesterday night and it is now available for download!

Milind Lele, Program Manager wrote a short note on the Visual FoxPro page. Thanks Milind for your team's hard work!

Here's a list of fixed bugs. XSOURCE for this release will be coming out soon.