Rainer Becker
You should not miss the SWFox DevCon. It covers a lot of great topics, treated by great speakers! But maybe economics are harsh again in your region and maybe there is a problem with the funding - concerning not only the money to spend, but also the time? Time of not being available at your desk for the perennially urgent development work, support and maintenance tasks?. Here come a few more reasons why you should circumnavigate all these obstacles somehow or why your boss should be won over, too.
Reason #1: Developers have to be highly qualified
You are a software developer and therefore you need to be qualified in many areas of your craft. Do not limit yourself to programming with Visual FoxPro only. Being good at writing code is important but people consider you to be an engineer and a consultant as well. In our company we have an easy rule of thumb: Not attending at least one day a month of workshops or conferences in average for the last year means no salary increase in the next year. Where else can you find so many interesting sessions to extend your qualification if not at the SWFox?
Reason #2: Developers need to know where to find the answer
Even if you are mightily qualified you cannot not know everything. But you can know a lot about the fundamentals of the problem and were to do research for a solution, whom to ask, where to go for advice. This task obviously is much easier to perform if you can ask the right questions. You are perceived as an analyst and an investigator. Of course online forums provide great help. But where else can you find so many interesting sessions to get a broader knowledge about multiple topics if not at SWFox?
Reason #3:Developers have to be open-minded
You are a problem solver by job description, kind of a scientist, perhaps and partially even an artist. Get out of your routine and surroundings for a couple of days, meet other people, discuss with colleagues. Where else can you meet so many open-minded people of the same kind if not at SWFox?
Reason #4: Developers hate to be told they are legacy
From a business perspective and at first glance it really does not make much sense anymore to invest money into a development environment that will be dropped in 2015 by the producer, with no official updates available any longer. By this definition Visual FoxPro applications are legacy code that sooner or later needs to be updated.
On the other hand the Visual FoxPro stack is still alive and there is no technical reason to stop using VFP for the next decade as it will be available on 32bit subsystems in a 64bit world as long as e.g. Microsoft Office is not being migrated to 64bit-only and maybe Microsoft Windows switched to 128bit with no 32bit subsystem available anymore.
So there are good business reasons to continue the good work you are doing! Maybe you have to change into a Jack-of-all-trades, a developer who is not only skilled at FoxPro but seasoned in many other areas, too, and with a thorough understanding of business. Funny new gadgets will not bring about much help in this case. You might have to turn into a communicator to fight off bad mouthing, short-sighted cost reduction and the outsource-o-mania of management. Where else can you find so many good arguments if not at SWFox?
Reason #5: Evolution instead of Revolution might be the best way
Nobody can afford to simply discard years of development work and then start from scratch, in a new development environment, with a new language and new tools. But old and new technology can cooperate. New and old techniques allow to migrate and extend existing applications step by step. And we want to show you how!
Microsoft Silverlight 5.0 has become available now. And our SilverSwitch Solution is not limited to users of our framework Visual Extend any more! Instead it is extended to convert your regular Visual FoxPro 9.0 applications (with some rules to obey) as well, and we extend SWFox for you at no cost.
You are herewith invited to a one-day Post-Conference workshop at the SWFox DevCon with updated topics regarding Silverswitch!
Even if you do not plan to switch to a hybrid solution with Silverlight you should know what is possible and how it is being done: What converted forms and reports look like, how FoxPro code is executed in the Silverlight client in any browser on different operating systems, and how it can access your back-end FoxPro code as well as DBF or Client/Server databases. Where else can you have such an action-packed day for free if not at the SWFox?
Hurry up now and register for SWFox at http://www.swfox.net (October 26-29).
And if you really cannot make it, go to http://devcon.dfpug.de with all the details about our 18thannual Visual FoxPro Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, November 10-12. A huge proportion of the lectures and workshops are being held in English by splendid speakers who have been regulars at that conference for a long time.
PS: Maybe you have not yet made use of our large online archive which contains all FoxRockX issues as well as almost all FoxTalk articles - but each subscriber has free unlimited access and credentials were provided to you.