The LA Fox Developer

A Newsletter for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California

Visit our WebSite at: http://www.mesllc.com/lafox.html

January 1998

MESLLC Announces

2nd Annual Conference

by Barry R. Lee

Microcomputer Engineering Services, LLC (MESLLC) has

formally announced confirmation of plans to sponsor their

second annual Visual FoxPro Conference, August 20-23, 1998.

MESLLC sponsored their first conference, appropriately named

“The First Annual Southwest Regional FoxPro Spring Confer-

ence”, in the Spring of 1997. Featuring world-class speakers

and vendors, it attracted attendees from across the United

States and the Phillipines.

This year, there are plans for an even bigger, better, and more

intense event. The conference itself has been renamed “The

2nd Annual Southern California Visual FoxPro Conference” and

has the distinction of being one of the only other FoxPro-related

conferences, besides Advisor DevCon in the Spring, that will be

held in 1998. Minneapolis, Toronto, and Milwaukee have

decided not to have conferences this year. Because of this, the

format of the MESLLC conference has been changed from a 2-

day event to three solid days of VFP.

The event will be held at The Doubletree Hotel in Costa Mesa,

CA. Selection of the site was based on the feedback from last

year’s conference, the primary complaint being that there was

no place to go in the evenings for entertainment and no where to

eat dinner, other than the hotel and the Taco Bell across the

street. <g>

Currently, the confirmed speakers for the conference are Tamar

Granor, Mac Rubel, Miriam Liskin, Rod Paddock, John V.

Petersen, Ken Levy, Les Pinter, Eldor Gemst, Whil Hentzen,

Drew Speedie, and Mike Feitman. More speakers will be

“signing up” over the next 30 days to complete the roster.

Attendees will have their choice of over 50 sessions to sit in on.

This event promises to be as “cost effective” as last years and

attendees will have more to do, both during the conference and

“after hours”.

The Conference WebSite is http://wviw.mesIIc.com/conf98.htmI.

In this issue

The Latest VFUG Stuff

“Mere Mortals” Update

Forms and Grids

LA Fox Year in Review

At LA Fox

Out and About

by Barry R. Lee

January 19, 1998, 7:30 PM - Les Pinter. While working on a

Ph.D. in economics at Rice University in Houston, Texas, Les

joined with two high-school friends to develop the Magic Wand,

one of the first word processing programs for microcomputers.

In 1990 he sold the source code to Microsoft, which used it in

the development of Microsoft Word. During the development of a

dBase III application for LucasFilm, Les discovered that

FoxBase ran hiS applications 7 times faster, and was

immedately hooked on Fox. He began The Pinter FoxPro Letter,

(now in its eighth year) a newsletter published both in the US

and in Moscow (a Russian language edition).Les has written 6

books on programming in FoxPro for McGraw-Hill. He is a

Contributing Editor for Point DBF, the French data base maga-

zine, a technical editor for lOG books, and writes “The Cutting

Edge” column for FoxTalk. His consulting practise in California

includes both corporate customers and firms that market

applications written in FoxPro. He gives in-house seminars in

English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Les is a

private pilot, and once played lead guitar in the road band for

Jerry Lee Lewis. [Sony. ..just had to stick that it in, Les!]

February 16, 1998, 7:30 PM - Jonathan Melvin. Jon’s topic

for the evening will be “Creating and Operating an Enterprise

System using Visual FoxPro”. It sounds like one you shouldn’t

miss. Here’s a “brief’ synopsis:

The largest underground storage tank testing company in the

United States operates their order entry, field operations, and

reporting using a distributed FoxPro system. This system has

been in continuous operation since 1983 and was originally

(Con't, page 2)

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5

Page 7 and much more

The January meeting of LA Fox will be held

on Jan.19, 1998, at 7:30 PM at our regular

meeting place (the Torrance Airport, 3301

Airport Drive, in Torrance). For details on

how to get there, see the map on the back

page.