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 larg-

est 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 pro-

duction version of Express.

This very intense conference began with an over-

view 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 confer-

ence, 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 tech-

niques 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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