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Microsoft Czech Republic and DAQUAS will organize a conference for developers who create applications using Microsoft Visual FoxPro. "Visual FoxPro DevCon, Praha 2004" will take place in Prague, Czech Republic on 22nd to 24th June 2004. Visual FoxPro DevCon, Praha 2004 will comprise of at least 30 sessions out of which more than 10 are presented in English by worldwide respected FoxPro experts. This year is the 7th year of the event and in 2003 it was the world's best attended FoxPro conference with an audience of almost 500!

Date:
Location:

• Day Zero
• Tuesday, June 22
• Wednesday, June 23
• Thursday, June 24
• Picture archive

The new Arena is the newest and most sophisticated sport arena in Europe. It was positioned near the City Center, probably because of good traffic accessibility. It is a building, which a tourist cannot afford not to see it.

The Arena offers a sitting capacity for 18,000 people and can not only serve as a hockey arena, but also offers to change the interior in more than 40 ways. Thanks to that, it can serve for nearly any sport activity, even swimming contests, motocross races and horse riding. It can also host a conference, a fair or a rock concert with a capacity of 18,000 people!

The Czech National Hockey Team is known to be one of the best hockey teams in the world. So there it was no surprise that every Czech very strongly believed that once the Championship was to be held in the Czech Republic, the Czechs of course had to win the Gold medal.

In the very beginning, everything looked perfect. The Czech Republic team won all the matches it played in. The bad luck came in the quart final match with USA. The score was balanced, there was an extra time, but in the end it came to penalties. And USA scored.

Unfortunately the fate of every quart final looser is that he has to leave the games. Since quite a few years no home team has ever won the medal. We have unfortunately honored that tradition. If you are interested and you don't already know, the Gold winner is Canada. And the Czech team is the only one who has beaten the Canadian team; well it was only a preparation play before the real contest started.

Jaroslav Hasek

This is the story about a famous book and the rather miserable life of its author. You most probably heard about the "Good Soldier Svejk", a guy who slyly ridiculed bureaucracies and the stiff behavior of some armies by just following orders by the word. Example: If someone would phone him and would have asked: "Can I speak to the General?" he would have answered, "Yes!" and hung up the phone. Why? Just take that question by the word...

The author of the book about good Soldier Svejk is Jaroslav Hasek who is one of the most famous writers in the Czech Republic. He was born in 1883 in Prague and died in 1923 in Lipnice. He lived mostly in Prague. Throughout his life Hasek proved to be a jerky, maladjusted spirit. He lived most of the time as free writers, had rarely a lengthy employment and if so, he lost it rather soon or left the job. For instance he had a badly paid job with the magazine 'The world of the animals' for a while. Since it became boring rather soon to report about existing animals, it let its fantasy play and 'invented' simply new animal species - the dismissal was the result. In 1910 he got married and had son Richard in 1910 with this wife. Soon after that he left his family and got divorced.

In 1916 he became a legionnaire. Two years later he left the legion. He said that the legionnaires were traitors. He entered then the Red Army. Here he was as enlightened worker. He changed his life. He stopped drinking and he became more skillful. In 1920 he went home with a Russian wife and his life started to become the same as before. He left politics and he started writing. He started drinking again and he got depressions.

In summer 1921 he went to Lipnice where he continued writing. But his health got worse. He died before he was 40 years old on flu and heart failure. More than 2000 of his Short stories and articles remained and are well known today.

His memory and style of writing are amazing: Someone would start to tell him some key words and he would immediately sat down and wrote 4 pages at once. He was able to talk and write at the same time. He was running to the Office before 6 o'clock, because the cash desk gets closed and he needs a honorarium. The story about writing Svejk is also very interesting. He used to send written pages form Lipnice to Prague and he kept by himself only the last page. He had always the whole story in his mind even including the last sentence.

He had an extensive knowledge of many topics. His favorite readings were books about cooking, books about travels, books about jokes, many and many interesting encyclopedias, glossaries and catechisms. He usually found many good ideas there. He wrote also satire of politic - "The Modest Advancement Side within the Limits of Law". This book was full of political satire and the current political scene easily mirrors everything.

Jaroslav Hasek found his place in the world literature with the figure of good soldier Svejk. The first two Svejk volumes appeared already in 1912 ('The good soldier Svejk and other strange little Stories') and in 1917 ('the good soldier Svejk in imprisonment'), but with the novel 'The adventures of the good soldier Svejk' he arrived at the zenith of his creative power. He could not complete the novel because he died.

The central shape of these novels is the dog dealer Josef Svejk who lived in Prague. Svejk is a human being, who on the one hand masters his daily life clumsily and naively, on the other hand survives the First World War with his wits, his directness and cleverness. The naive Svejk stands in a continuing fight against bureaucracy, national arbitrariness and militarism and exposes it with his straightforwardness as ridiculous pose. Though different in detail there is a great similarity to Franz Kafka. Both see the individual persons as victims of a hardly transparent social mesh and of an authoritarian-nationalistic government marked by arbitrariness (called "patriotism"). But while Kafka sees this as general phenomenon of life, contemporary history and the reality of the daily life of normal human beings are in the center of Hasek's attention and writing. Maybe that this is what made him world famous.

Antonín Slavicek

After more than 40 year the public have an opportunity to see a big retrospection of the founder of the Czech modern art. It is nobody else than Antonín Slavicek, one of the greatest Czech painters.

The exposition is shown in the Prague Gallery, Library. There are about 250 paintings. This exposition was opened on 17.03.2004 and it will be closed on 07.09.2004.

The Expo will introduce an autumn mood and melancholy to you. Also you will see paintings full of love, energy and joy of the life. Paintings full of sunrise and summer atmosphere. In 1905 painter began to be bored by land paintings. He changed his style and started painted many and many small pictures of houses, dwellings and settlements. He didn't paint just villages but big towns as well. He also started to depict live in Prague.

Finally the city of Prague became the inspiration of his life for Slavicek. He has drawn a view of Prague seen from Ladvi, which he has finished in just a couple of days. After finishing this picture he painted another view over Prague from Letna. The last of his paintings was Saint Vít's Cathedral. But he hasn't finished it; because of a very severe illness he committed suicide.

Igor also introduced Antonio Lacuna, the Microsoft Europe's Business Development Manager for Eastern Europe. He is the responsible manager of Microsoft Europe for all commercial affairs of Microsoft's developer tools for Eastern Europe, like the Czech Republic, Rumania, Russia and Poland. If there is anything (except technical questions of course), please mail him.

Events of this character should always be celebrated with some thoughts about where you come from: There is no future without a past. So Igor put on a traditional dressing, which fits him quite well. Also more of Daquas people joined him, and in order to respect the local habit, Antonio Lacuna did not hesitate to follow also. (Remember? Think global act local!)

Key Note: On Route To Visual FoxPro 9.0

Ken Levy first presented a carefully compiled selection of music like the themes to the James Bond and Star Wars movies to keep the waiting audience happy. Then he proudly presented an equally carefully compiled selection of many of the new features of Visual FoxPro, which obviously really made the audience happy.

As Ken outlined, the selection and the design of the new features of Visual FoxPro is heavily based on the wish lists from customer feedback. Major goals have been:

• Maintain backward compatibility.
• Enhance database language and types.
• Additional end user UI features.
• Increase developer productivity.
• Improve Report Writer significantly.
• Extend .NET and SQL Server interoperability.
• More extensibility, Xbase source code.

The final release is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2004.

Major themes in the development of Visual FoxPro 9.0 has been

• Data-Handling and Interoperability: .NET interoperability (XML and XML Web Services) and SQL Server interoperability (data types and language)
• Extensible Developer Productivity Tools: Enhancements will be found in the IntelliSense, IDE, in the new Property sheet customization and in the enhanced design tools for reports, forms, controls
• Increased flexibility for all types of solutions from a Smart client to Tablet PC applications

One of the hidden treasures within FoxPro will not only be maintained, it also will be enhanced: Quite a few of the developer tools are written in FoxPro and the source is provided with the product. This is a great source of learning on how to use the language.

And everybody who knows Ken Levy could have imagined what followed now: Lots of lots of lots of lots of ... "Hey, wait a minute!" he most probably would have said here: "That's enough of the 'lots'!" Well, OK, we'll take back some of the lots, but believe us, there were really a great many of well designed examples from the huge wealth of new features of the new old Visual FoxPro. Some of these enhancements have been popping up here and there, but this was a very comprehensive compilation. Among others Ken showed examples to demonstrate these features:

• The fonts in the Project Manager can be changed now.
• Anchor: This new feature simplifies the resizing and relocation of objects on forms substantially.
• Intellisense works now within the with/endwith, even several layers down.
• Limit of 65000: This limit is not valid any more for arrays and - guess it - procedures within files.
• The IIF(), which has been around for many years, will become a companion: The ICASE(), which will include multiple CASE and one OTHERWISE statement besides DO CASE and ENDCASE. So it works like a function delivering a return value.
• The graphical presentation of nearly all controls has been improved and their graphical abilities vastly enhanced: They can rotate, move the picture around the caption, have hidden hot keys, and many more items. PolyPoints seems to have attracted Ken's special attention and invoked his fun to play with it.
• XML Adapter, the universal genius in connecting to everything "on the 'net", which has or accepts data, has been enhanced even further: It now can represent hierarchical XML data (i.e. several tables which have a dependency) better and easier than ever before.

Properties got a special attention:

• Now a developer can develop his favorite properties on any object (limited within Visual FoxPro unfortunately).
• New Properties can be defined and added with their initial value just in one turn.
• If member data (which mostly refers to properties) are very long, you can make them visible in a kind of a tooltip display.
• Any code (Visual FoxPro's code only of course) will work on any property on any object at design time.

It might not be the most exiting thing on the first view: but the contents of a memo field can nor only be code colored (works since Visual FoxPro 8), but you now can have them "intellisensed" as well. This in effect means, that once you hook an spell check onto intellisense, then you use memo fields an input area for long texts with an integrated spell checker in the user interface.

And of course, the report generator has been finally brought into the modern age. So it will not anymore be the problem child of every developer. As the protection of investments in frx-s has been a major design goal, an unusual command had to be introduced:

SET REPORTBEHAVIOR 90

There are too many new features to be described here, therefore there is a selection here:

• The report now has properties (see the Beta for details), which can be set like all other properties, i.e. on runtime as well.
• Preview in a Visual FoxPro form, which lets you have more control than ever, especially when allowing the user to run previews and change the output.
• Protection of objects in the report. This refers to the same situation as the previous point: You can prevent a user changing certain portions of the report, once you allow him to run a preview and change the output.

If you do want more information, just download the Beta, install it and go to the "What is new section" in the Help file and release notes (also included), There is also a vast amount of information concerning the report writer.

As VFP 9.0 is still in the Beta stage for the moment, Ken asks everybody to download the VFP 9.0 public beta and the additional stuff (Whitepapers and samples). Ken asks everybody to run existing applications with it and report the feedback, in case, an error is found.

In the Internet you will find community resources, public VFP newsgroups and related VFP communities, so just check these places for more news and information. There is a VS Data Team Blog, a Ken Levy's Blog, a Calvin Hsia's Blog and a special edition of the CoDe Magazine for VFP 9.0 in fall 2004. Ken also recommended keeping an eye on FoxPro Advisor and FoxTalk 2.0, which will publish articles on Visual FoxPro 9.0 rather soon.

Visual FoxPro 9.0 Review

Everyone has been looking forward to Visual FoxPro 9.0. Now VFP 9.0 has arrived and many questions have to be answered. Is VFP 9.0 useful? Are there features and news which will help us to develop application much more effectively and useful?

This session was directed to present some new features of Visual FoxPro 9.0 and also about some items that do not work very well. Though Ken Levy took great efforts to present as much as he could, there was just not enough time to present all information what the new version has to offer or what the new version is able or unable to do.

So Pavel Celba made some overview through news of VFP 9.0, which nicely augmented the Key Note. He explained new data types like VARCHAR or BLOG, and then showed examples with some of new commands, using ICASE() and CAST(), which are very useful functions, or the new property autocomplete. Pavel also presented some new items of the Report Writer, which he thinks to be one of the major advantages of Visual FoxPro 9.0.

He also spoke about XML features, which he thinks to be very important in the future. We cite: "Without knowing XML we not only will not be able to understand our women in the future, but we also will not understand our refrigerators."

The good sense of humor of this speaker made it a fun to follow his session. At the end Pavel made an important remark: If you want many more versions of Visual FoxPro then go out and by Visual FoxPro 9. If many developers buy Visual FoxPro 9 and put forward their wishes on a wish list then there certainly will be a version 10 with even more features as proposed by the developer community.

Introduction To Business Object Programming and VFP Business Object Extensibility And Configuration

As Steven Black pointed out you can do everything in many ways. But, as the old Romans already said: "respice finem" or (rephrased but not translated) "consider, where you finally will arrive at" (Steven didn't quote this, it was slipped in by the reporters as a sign of admiration).

This session was not about how you design this or that detail of something, this session actually was about meta design rules. Steven concentrated on explaining how to use the available architectural design schemes to create applications, whose internal working does not only fit into the today's world of a user but also survives the unavoidable changes in that user's real world, without causing nightmares to the developer.

Of course there are many more benefits using this generalized design schemes such as greater adaptability to different environments etc. But as Steven pointed out, there is a price to be paid when using this approach: As the initial analysis and design considerations require considerable efforts, it needs to have larger application to have a decent payoff quickly. Small Systems are easier to build and maintain. To build large systems requires technology, a good system engineering approach, an ample amount of time and a sound financial basis.

Steven reviewed what Business Objects are, the VFP Business Objects programming patterns and Extensibility and Configurability of Business Objects. As these are related yet larger fields, Steven used two sessions to present these topics.

There are just 2 benefits from using technology in system design (and this is not restricted to system design and programming):

• Increase in VALUE of the work
• Increase in CONTROL over the work

Externally, Business objects mirror tangible things the business cares about, like:

• Parties (people, organizations,...)
• Transactions, orders, products, shipments, loads, routes, ..
• Assets (vehicles, buildings, machines...)
• Documents, work items,...
• Processes, workflows, events,...

Internally, Business Objects can be designed to do many things, configured by metadata. For example:

• Manage data,
• enforce business rules and validation,
• provide a variety of ancillary services, and
• collaborate with other business objects

Steven went further into the details, which is far too much for this report. But being an experienced presentator, he also provided a paper to this topic, which can easily be downloaded

XML Web Services In Visual FoxPro, Step By Step

It is some time now, since Web Services became accepted as a standard for exchanging data among non-compatible applications and systems. So, it is to no surprise, that that XML Web Services became to evolve. In his session Jan Vít looked on the existing and on the new possibilities of working with Web Services from the FoxPro developer perspective.

The first third of the session was devoted to introducing Web Services standards, such as SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. The whole communication, which is exchanged between client and server, was demonstrated on a simple, but effective schema. This part was mostly for developers, who get involved with Web Services for the first time.

The other two thirds were pure demos of using and creating a Web Service in Visual FoxPro. The first demo showed already very familiar things - retrieving data from the FoxCentralNews Web Service. The second explained creating a Web Service from the scratch and, of course, demonstrated how to use it.

In this part, Jan also showed his tool called HttpTrace, which is capable of showing the exact SOAP requests and responses while HTTP-messages are exchanged.

To demonstrate that Web Services are software and platform independent, Jan accessed the newly created Web Service from Visual Basic Script, ASP page and even .NET.

As this was the first session Jan Vít ever did, everybody kept his fingers crossed for him including his parents. They came so that Jan had someone to look at who would always smile back. Well, all of this turned out to be completely unnecessary, because Jan mastered his first session with the ease of an experienced presentator, who perfectly knew, what he was talking about, always full in command of the audience. So, welcome in the Club, Jan! (Last paragraph added by Hans and Jan Král.)

Use Visual FoxPro To Provide And Consume XML

XML was designed as a language to serve as a platform independent transporting mechanism of data and other information. Yet XML is "only" a standard for describing how information is structured. This makes it much easier to structure information and to move it from one application to the next one, or from one program to another. On the other side, XML does not specify, how the information should be structured, though it provides means to describe the data structure, with these definitions also been written in XML (the DTD - Document Type Definition). In some ways XML is nothing but another Markup Language, yet as it has been widely accepted as THE mean of transporting data in the B2B world, it has by far outgrown its original intent.

One of the reasons of the popularity of XML is, that it is also well suited to transport data between applications or within applications, both on the web and the desktop. There is virtually no data end or data server (SQL or otherwise), which cannot provide its data as XML string or accept XML formated data.

Visual FoxPro's powerful XML support makes it easy for it to play well with others as both an XML provider and an XML consumer. Therefore Toni Feltman focused in this session on how to use the XML tools that are an integral part of Visual FoxPro since version 7.0.

Toni outlined the features, which are available in Visual FoxPro 8.0 to assist the developer in producing and consuming XML. These features include, but are not limited to:

• CURSORTOXML(),
• XMLTOCURSOR(),
• XMLUPDATEGRAM(),
• XMLAdapter,
• XMLField,
• XMLTable

With a wealth of examples Toni showed how each of these features can be used to both consume and produce well formed and valid XML documents. She includes carefully designed comparisons so the attendees could understand the different ways that Visual FoxPro can work with XML in order to have a better assessment of which features should be used in which situation that a developer may encounter in every project.

Toni enhanced her session with real world examples, which use Visual FoxPro power to produce and consume XML documents, which were based on the foundations that were laid out earlier in this session. A very nice take home from this session are two small working examples with classes that will streamline the process of working with XML documents in every developers' Visual FoxPro applications.

Toni also took care of the applications build with FoxPro 2.6, which are, because they are well built, still running and doing their job well. If a developer knows the twists and wrinkles of XML well he / she might also use the powerful TEXT / ENDTEXT in conjunction with the low level functions FCREATE, FOPEN FCLOSE FREAD FWRITE to create plain text files to send / receive XML data.

Example (courtesy F1 Technologies):

LOCAL ;
	lnI AS Integer, ;
	lcField AS Character 

* Open the data source.	
OPEN DATABASE Test
USE Offices

* Setup textmerge.
SET TEXTMERGE DELIMITERS TO [{], [}]
SET TEXTMERGE TO [Offices_TextMerge.xml]
SET TEXTMERGE ON NOSHOW

* Start to build the XML document by hand.
\\
\
\

* Add nodes for each record.
SCAN
	\
	FOR lnI = 1 TO FCOUNT()
		lcField = FIELD(lnI)
		\	<{PROPER(lcField)}>{ALLTRIM(TRANSFORM(EVALUATE(lcField)))}
	ENDFOR	
	\
ENDSCAN
\

* Cleanup
SET TEXTMERGE OFF
SET TEXTMERGE DELIMITERS TO
SET TEXTMERGE TO
USE
CLOSE DATABASE

Team Development With Visual FoxPro

At some point in each developer's career he or she will have to work at least with another developer on a project. In this session Mike and Toni Feltman gave a little insight into managing the developer team, as well as few proposals for a single developer, who wants to have his source code properly organized.

There are two things, you have to settle first:

• Design, design, design ... Design is the most important thing. The application has to be based on modules. Each team can than develop their module independently and at the end, all modules can be combined and tested.
• At the start, all teams should have their priorities. It can easily come to a situation, when one team needs a module from the other team to complete theirs and therefore has to wait. This can be more or less avoided if proper priorities are made and tasks are divided in the beginning.

Mike and Toni than explained the necessity that some people are made responsible for certain parts of the project. These people should divide tasks according to specific rules. The rule number one is, of course, skills. The other one is how much is the person occupied by now. This list could go on and on. You should not forget even about the secretary! While she has no phone call to handle, she can test some applications! Why? Additional testing is helpful and everybody should be able to handle your user-friendly GUI, right?

Together with demonstration of Visual SourceSafe Mike and Toni gave the ideas about on-line team communication (Outlook, Windows Messenger, Chat, etc.), naming and comments conventions and lots of other things.

And one thing at the end: When the project ends, no matter whether successfully or not, you certainly should get over the whole process once again and see, what was good, what went wrong and make some modifications to your strategy of leading the team, so you make sure you will avoid making the same mistakes next time.

x = Create("SomeClass")
x.OpenFiles()
x.DoSomething()
x.CloseFiles()

x = Create("SomeClass")
x.Process()

Steven brought some more example, but reporting them would explode a report like this. See some of his papers on this topic.

Well, we could not resist to mention one, actually very thoughtful, example from the session:

"Object oriented Cow"

Imagine an object oriented cowshed, object oriented cows and, of course, object oriented milk.

Now comes the question: Should the oo-cow send the oo-milk the UnCowYourself() message (UnCow = "Get out of me!"), or should the oo-milk send the oo-cow the UnMilkYourself() message (UnMilk = Shed the milk!)"? - What is your decision?

Well, before digging too deep into a decision tree, consider what might be missing? - Well of course, the farmer!

Sometimes it is very useful to put some object (e.g. the farmer) into the middle (between the milk and the cow) to handle things in a better fashion, don't you agree?

As this was the last session, held by Steven Black, in this year's Prague DevCon, the attendance was very good and included even those who obviously do not master the English language too well.

Case Study: How We Did It - Clavius

The next of the sessions "How We did It" is about Clavius. It is a library system developed in and for a small town called Tabor, whose adaptable "client / server" architecture is using as well Microsoft SQL Server as Oracle9i for storing data.

The clients have been developed in Visual FoxPro. Jirí Šilha and Ivan Cerný explained important details on how to work with implementation in different versions of Visual FoxPro, updating program modules using HTTP protocol, while the program is still working on a network and how to work with different databases on different database servers.

Both explained the necessary basics of having applications communicate over a long distance and how to access the data server via internet. They also gave us some insight into their data structure - examples: They do not use .NULL. They advised us strongly that it is better not to use logical values in a Microsoft SQL Server.

At the end of the session they presented their business model. They also outlined some of the restriction of this application: for example, the front end can only handle a limited number of books.

XML Web Services For Advanced Developer

"Everybody heard about Web Services, many have tried to create them, but only few people are using them in real world applications." This is the motto of the whole session, presented by Petr Zaoral. He ventured to explain all those details about using and creating Web Services which you need to know in order to avoid falling into the many pitfalls you may encounter and wished you haven't.

Those pitfalls certainly include getting a "File access denied" error when you want to rebuild a DLL which is currently cached by IIS, how to make SLL and authenticated communication and so on. If you're behind the proxy, having an ability to configure the proxy settings might also become very handy.

Petr than explained what is the actual content of SOAP message, both request and response and described the most important parts.

Some developers like to use Microsoft SOAP Toolkit as some kind of a black box. Some like to have a full control of what the computer is doing. If you belong to latter type, you may find the SOAP object model useful.

If you combine the last two things mentioned above you could use SOAP headers to get better security or even make web services stateful! If you're wondering how you can make stateless technology stateful, just remember something from ASP or PHP. Those two languages are using special unique key for identifying each client. Once there has already been a communication with a particular key and the same client is calling again, the server now precisely knows where the previous communication has ended and can go on now.

By implementing a special class, which is designed exclusively for this purpose, SOAP headers can be modified. After explaining all the necessary theoretical stuff, Petr showed actual Visual FoxPro example forms.

At the end came the so called "philosophical conclusion": With this conclusion Petr wanted to empathize, that web services are very powerful and very flexible technology. While there are not so many implementations yet, certainly, new ones are becoming alive. Among others, Petr mentioned Google, which is almost always forehead in internet technologies and an eBay web service.

Connect Visual FoxPro To SQL Servers - For Beginners

Have you ever considered working with SQL Server but did not do it yet? If so then this session of Petr Bauer was the right one for you. This session was mainly about how to work effectively with the SQL Server and how to bring SQL Server and Visual FoxPro together.

First Petr explained the basics of SQL Servers and why SQL Servers are well suited to store the data. After this he continued to explain the different versions of SQL Server like Standard edition, Professional edition, Developer edition and also the MSDE and its limitations. The session also included the SQL Server tools.

Petr explained three important SQL Server tools:

• Enterprise manager - security, creating tables, backup
• Query analyzer - testing queries
• SQL Server Service manager - starting and managing SQL Server

Petr also explained the most important aspects on how to connect SQL server and Visual FoxPro:

• Using ODBC - it is a mediator between VFP and SQL Server
• Using Connecting String

He also demonstrated the use of further important commands and features (CursorAdapter, SqlExec, Update), which you most likely will use when you start working with SQL Server. He also compared MySQL and SQL Server. Are you interested in his conclusions? MS SQL Server is not only more powerful, it is also more reliable and much faster than MySQL.

He also spoke about some easy to use frameworks for SQL Server, where you have to set just a couple of parameters and then start editing your own data on the SQL Server. Finally Petr showed some nice and very useful examples.

ABC#

(To be spoken in a low voice, so only your neighbor can hear it: Spell it a-be-cee-sharp!)

As usual, all the attendees were looking forward to see Milan Kosina's PowerPoint Show, which is getting more and more remarkable from year to year. -- Yes, you're right. -- The ONLY slide presented was the slide featuring the name of the session (quite short this time - ABC#) and Milan's name together with his email address.

When he closed the PowerPoint-"Presentation" a big applause started and everybody in the room was looking forward to Milan's session, composed of things coming from rich developer experience!

C# is very often to be considered as the main language of .NET. .NET is considered to be something very different from Visual FoxPro and something FoxPro developers will never need. - Lets reconsider! An extra knowledge can always become useful.

The main goal of this session was to get all attendees acquainted with the C# language from the very beginning. Milan knew that everybody in the room spoke FoxPro, so he took the role of a simultaneous interpreter between attendees and the projection screen.

If you expect Milan has just opened the VS.NET and started writing the code, you're wrong. He just opened the text file and there he had his code. After that, he ran the compile program, which is part of the free .NET Framework from Microsoft, and showed how easily he made a C# application!

He explained many new terms, which FoxPro developers are not familiar with (i.e. structs, namespaces, etc.), compared operators, coding techniques and finally got even to access a FoxPro DBF through an OLE DB driver.

Watching everybody leaving the session, it became immediately clear, that the attendees were seriously contemplating what they had just heard.

Introduction to Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services

Michal Neuwirth's session was about the basics of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, which are an enlargement of MS SQL Server to create and browse output reports.

First of all he was speaking about the architecture of the SQL Server Reporting Services and compared them with developing own reports using Visual Studio .NET or third party programs. Everybody, who bought SQL Server 2000, can use this Report Service. When the report is created, it can be used only with SQL Server 2000.

Which data sources can be used? The data source, which he used in his examples can be tables or databases from SQL Server. But the data source also can be OLE DB, .NET data providers, ODBC even Oracle. There are two types of connection:

• 1. Share connection (for more than one report)
• 2. Private connection (just for one report)

Michal showed the audience that the output from the SQL Server RS can be in different formats like .xls (Excel), XML, HTML 4.0 and even PDF. If you like you even can have the report send to you by e-mail after setting which type of output file would you like to have (of course, the SQL Server has to have a connection to a mail facility). Do you like nicely formatted reports and graphic design? No problem, with SQL Server RS you can use pictures, color lines, triangles and so on to make you report prettier.

Michal also showed the Item Properties (Border Style, Padding, Text align etc.) and the Report Parameters. Parameter can also be transmitted to other reports. He also dealt with the task how to secure reports. For each topic Michal presented convincing examples.

Client Server Data Access Techniques With Visual FoxPro

Mike Feltman presented the material on C/S data access techniques in two sessions. This report covers both of them.

Visual FoxPro offers numerous means of accessing remote data. Among those are

• Remote Views,
• Dynamic SQL Pass Through,
• SQL Pass Through calling Stored Procedures,
• ADO,
• XML,
• CursorAdapter.

Mike presented a comparison and put together pros and cons of each technique and gave some advice on what method to choose in a particular situation.

First section of the session was called "ease of use". Here, Mike went through every tool and described, how efficiently and easily you can put them to use by comparing them by these criteria

• Ease of Use
• UI and Tool Support
• Normalcy
• Plays Well With Others

Mike showed all interesting options you can set if you decided to access the remote data via a Remote View. Next came Dynamic SQL Pass-Through, where Mike described SQLEXEC() command and many of its possible parameters. He also pointed out that using questions marks helps to define queries better. When speaking about stored procedures Mike pointed out one strong disadvantage of their usage: You mostly have to update stored procedures together with change in your application and as they are not part of your application they are hard to maintain. But, of course, you get a very good performance compared to other access methods.

According to Mike, CursorAdapters are very useful, though at some part not designed, as he would like to have. He regrets that they came quite late.

Here is a very short summary of his comparison of the access methods:

• Remote Views
• . Least Maintenance
• . Fastest Development
• . Least Flexible
• . Least Powerful
• . Easy Deployment
• Dynamic SQL
• . Low Maintenance
• . Fast Development
• . Highly Flexible
• . Powerful
• . Easy Deployment
• Stored Procedures
• . Most Maintenance
• . Slower Development
• . Most Flexible
• . Most Powerful
• . Deployment Concerns
• CursorAdapter with ODBC
• . Poor Maintenance
• . Fast Development
• . Very Flexible
• . Very Powerful
• . Deployment depends on implementation
• CursorAdapter with ADO
• . Poor Maintenance
• . Fast Development
• . Very Flexible
• . Very Powerful
• . MDAC Required for Deployment

There is no best advice, what technique is best for all situations. For every single implementation the technique should to be chosen, which fits best to the particular situation. What should be taken into consideration, when contemplating this choice? Size and content matters, performance may be different, results can vary depending on the technique chosen, and so forth. Mike claims, that developers, who have much more experience than he has and who are taking care of large databases, swear, that stored procedures would be the best solution.

License Problems

Darina Vodrážková seminar was very interesting and at the same time quite unusual. Maybe one can say that it wasn't exactly a seminar of the usual type it was more something like a Questions & Answers Session. And as the audience had a vivid interest in this topic there were many questions and a good answer for each of them. So this seminar was very successful.

The seminar would help not to go astray from the area of legality and join the software pirates. It showed how you could prove that your software is legal. The discussion also included licensing of OEM version. Darina also discussed problems with distributing or copying software. There are - as everybody knows - tons of questions in this field. Darina focused on those questions, which have been in the focus of the audience.

These questions included how many of licenses you would need when you are working at your office or at home. Another of the questions of wide interest had been the licensing rules for SQL Server and Windows Server, for instance what to do if you have one processor license, but your server has two processors.

What is the situation if you use more then one version of a product at the same time? Is that legal? How many people and computers can share one license? As these questions concern the daily life of all developers the discussion and the participation of the audience were very vivid and everybody enjoyed the seminar.

Q & A

During the first two days of the conference, all attendees had an opportunity to write their technical questions onto a sheet of paper and put these question papers into a box at the conference reception. Traditionally, at the end of the second conference day, a panel of the speakers would answer these questions.

Right at the beginning Igor announced, that there will be a change in the handling of the Q&A since last years. This year there will be no evaluation of how many questions were answered successfully and how many were not. The organizers were afraid they might loose this year. At the end, all questions except one, which went to the technical support, were well answered - the audience was evaluating each answer. Everybody in the audience was happy, the panel was happy and Igor as well, as he got the panel well motivated just from the beginning <vbg>.

Out of the wealth of questions the reporters selected two, where they found the answers quite useful:

Q: What operating systems will the VFP9 Runtime and the Development environment run on?"
A: There are currently no changes planned compared to version 8. That means the runtime will need Windows 98 and up and the development environment will need at least Windows 2000.

Q: "Are the new Report tools going to be translated to Czech?"
(By the way this is quite an important question for FoxHeads in the Czech Republic.)
A: The whole runtime of Visual FoxPro 9 will be available in Czech, as it has always been. It isn't clear now, who will take care of the translations. However, it is not so hard to do it by ourselves using the header file supplied with those tools, it would certainly be nice to have it unified somehow.

LOCAL lnNumber as Numeric
lnNumber = 1.000
? GetDecimalPlaces(lnNumber)

create cursor junk (mNotes m)
modi memo mNotes

• XFRX - Export VFP reports to electronic formats - by Martin Haluza
• Visual FoxExpress - Complete OOP Framework for Visual FoxPro - by Mike Feltman
• Visual Extend - RAD Tool for Fat Client Applications with Visual FoxPro - by Uwe Habermann and Venelina Jordanova
  Having fun with VFP and VFX - by Rainer Becker
• ReFox - Decompiler and Brander for Visual FoxPro - by Jan Brebera
• QFoks - a library with more than 500 useful software tools (in Czech language only) - by Jirí Becka
• Stonefield Query: - The Next Generation of Reporting - by Martin Haluza

Farewell

The DevCon ended at lunchtime and everybody went home.

Thank you for reading so far!

Words Of Thanks

Now we are at the end of our report. Really? Well not exactly, some very important items are still uncovered. As in the last years we, the reporters, have had the honor to write this report. We are very grateful for that.

Though nobody authorized us to do so, we think that we do not speak only for ourselves, but also for all attendees including the speakers and everybody else:

Closing Words and Acknowledgements.

This has been the report about this year's DevCon in Prague. Including the speakers more than 450 people attended this DevCon (452 to be exact). Daquas' record of this year: 35 attendees have been coming from abroad (18 last year). This DevCon it lasted for 2 1/2 days. There have been 19 Czech speaking and 7 English speaking speakers; 1 Key Note plus 38 Sessions (plus 3 repeat sessions), out of which 17 were held in English (close to 50 % of the session were held in English), the sessions included 7 vendor sessions, out of which 3 were held in English, and an unknown number of parties (exact number not known as nobody cared to report duly).

We took the information for Day Zero from the various internet sites, cited in there, including all pictures and trademarks. All trademarks are property of their respective owners.

At the end Jan Vit and Jan Krŕl and myself want to extend our thanks to everybody who helped us preparing this report:

• Quite a few people supported us by supplying with their material and in many other ways in writing this report. Thank you all!
• Besides my wife, Gaby, who did the majority of the photos, Steven Black, Toni Feltman and - guess who? - the friendly people from Daquas supplied us with photos, so finally we had about 700 to select from. Thank you all!
• Igor Vit - his persistence, creativity and never ending friendliness helped a great deal. Thank you, Igor!
• Darina Vodrážková - her ability to keep lots of open ends in her hand without losing control and her smile held the organization together. Thank you, Darina!
• Michel Fournier - he enabled UT, he invented this type of reporting and, above all, showed remarkable patience with us because we constantly missed the deadlines. Thank you, Michel!

Hans-Otto Lochmann, Dr. Lochmann Consulting Gmbh   In the early 1970-s I spend my first professional years writing software for process control systems, using assembler and FORTRAN. I got my first PC in 1980 and bought dBase II. A couple of projects later dBase III Plus annoyed me with its "abnormalities" (nice word). In 1989 someone pointed me to FoxPro, which since then is my favorite development tool. Since January 1993 I am a member of the German user group. The people who take care of FoxPro have my deepest admiration, because they always have been able to place VFP at the top of the trade and they seem to be determined to keep it that way. Besides VFP I also use VB/VBA and Office Automation in my projects. Today I earn my living as partner of a very successful recruitment organization in Germany (http://www.baumann-ag.com).

Jan Vít, Vitsoft   Jan Vít is a student of the University Of Economics in Prague. Since 1993 he has been actively interested in programming as well as other areas of information technology. His computer experience started with PC 80386 with FoxPro 1.02, later followed by higher versions for the DOS platform and since 1999 he has been using the newest Visual FoxPro versions together with other programming languages and tools. Presently he spends most of his time with Visual FoxPro 9.0, MS SQL Server and C# in WinForms as well as WebForms development. He has been a regular speaker on the Czech Visual FoxPro DevCons since 2004 and is also the co-author of many DevCon conference reports from Prague and Germany. His work now mainly consists of developing software for pharmacies.

Jan Kral   My name is Jan Kral and I am studying Third Faculty of Medicine, Charles University in Prague. I am interested in computer technology and medical science. In my free time I develop applications using Visual FoxPro 7,8 and nowadays I use VFP 9.0, all mostly for my personal use. I have been a co-author of several Czech VFP DevCons' UT reports. I also develop internet web pages using PHP, JavaScript, CSS and so on. Feel free contact me at my email.