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The LA Fox Developer Newsletter
December 1995
Express DevCon (Con't from page 1) dance, with people coming from as far away as Mexico, Canada, and Holland. However, the largest single delegation was from LA Fox.) Most of the sessions dealt with VFP and previews of VFE, while the remaining dealt with FEX2.6, the current production version of Express.

This very intense conference began with an overview of the product, Visual FoxExpress, and then proceeded from the basic visual/OOP development paradigm to advanced development issues. Some of the sessions included: 1) Introduction to Object- Oriented Programming;2) The Codebook Class Hierarchy (Overview and Advanced, covered in two separate sessions.); 3) The Visual FoxPro Class Designer and Class Browser; 4) The Visual FoxPro Database Container (DBC); 5) DBCX - The Visual FoxPro Database Container Extensions (also available on the FoxForum); 6) Advanced OLE Automation; 7) FE 2.6 MacIntosh and Windows Cross-Platform Development; and 8) Client Server Basics, to name a few.

Of course, everyone got to see the newest version of VFE, previewed on a daily basis. And I do mean “daily basis”. After each day’s events, Mike and Toni would return to their room and make tweaks and modifications to the baseline Visual product, in an effort to keep pace with the session speakers’ requirements. The Neon staff that ran the conference, behind the scenes, also deserves an “above- and-beyond” award for conference planning and the meals, as well as the daily fires that had to be put out. Not that there were many, and if there were, most of the attendees weren’t aware.

Attendees were also privileged to get first glimpses of Visual FoxFire!, from Micromega, and FoxCase, a new data modeling tool that outputs to VFP’s Database Container.

There were a number of things that made this conference a “stand-out” for me. It provided an opportunity to make new friends and renew old friendships, discuss development issues and techniques with people from all over the country, have one-on-one discussions with the speakers over breakfast, lunch, or dinner. But the most important message was that if we, as developers, are to maintain our competitive edge, we’ll have to learn to incorporate third party products into our thinking.
Caught in the ‘Net (Con't from page 5)


The Christmas “Skinny”
The Annual LA Fox Christmas Party will take place on Tuesday , December 19, 1995, from 7:30 pm to 10:00 pm. Featured speakers for the first half of the night will be Bill Anderson and Ken Levy.

The second half of the evening will be taken up with the party, refreshments,fun, and friendship. As an added feature this year, we’ll be having a “White Elephant Gift Exchange”.
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