DevBlog

So, you want to go to the PDC and you don't know how to approach your boss? Or maybe the boss has already said, "no"? Perhaps the Convince the Boss Letter Wizard can help.

This is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay funny! You may need to disable popup blockers and make sure you click on the lightbulbs. The opening countdown reminds me of the old Whilfest, where Whil would start sessions at 10:32. Thanks to Drew for pointing to it.

Along with the official naming of Windows Vista, Longhorn and Avalon have new names. Indigo is now Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Avalon is Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

Why the name change? Because I talk about more than Visual FoxPro, I thought a more generic name was in order. Fox will still be here. .Net will be here. In fact, what I blog really won't change. Also, with a new name, I thought a new look was in order. There may be some pains while I get the new template tweaked.

Windows Longhorn, the long anticipated, and often delayed new version of Windows is no more. Gone. Disappeared. Doesn't exist. At least as Longhorn. It's been officially named Windows Vista. Beta 1 is due August 3. Visit the official home page.

Back in June, I commented on how VFP's datacentric design was being looked at by other Microsoft groups and would find it's way into .Net. Now, Mary Jo Foley of MicrosoftWatch puts the question directly to Anders Hejlsberg, the Father of C#.

So, what does this all mean? Was I wrong? Will .Net borrow from VFP or not? I think the answer is a definate "maybe". Many ideas and capabilities from VFP will be brought into .Net and others will not. Ken Levy has already commented that C# will take a different approach than VB and that VB will look closer to VFP's way of doing things than C# will.

Now today, you may be working with Fox and thinking about adding .Net. You're asking yourself if you should choose C# or VB. A recent survey be Microsoft shows that .Net usage by Fox developers is split almost 50/50 between VB and C#. The answer is to pick whichever language you feel more comfortable with.

I nearly missed this. Today is "Embrace Your Geekness Day". Here are some ideas you can do to celebrate:

- Hold a video game party at your house
- See how much tape you can put on your glasses before they won't stay on your face
- Get some coworkers together and have a slide rule competition
- Pay homage to the pocket protector

Any more ideas?

Scoble points to this piece of research on user interfaces. So, why is this UI bad? The fly-out animation of the menus is distracting. It literally gave me a headache and motion sickness. There is text under the hand/mouse graphic, but I can't read it. If you try to move it, something else pops up. Sometimes when you click, it brings up another page that says you shouldn't have clicked there. If there's someplace to send feedback on the research, I didn't find it. I closed the page without reading too much.

Microsoft's Eric Lippert offers Advice for First-Time Technical Presenters. I agree with most of what he says. I'm not sure I agree with his advice the six word graphic. However, is this stuff really for first time presenters? Should those of us that have been doing presentations for years critically look at what we do and see if we fall short in some areas? Absolutely we should. I do it everytime I give a presentation...and hope to improve the next time around.

Yup, there is a new VFP 9.0 book out and it's not from Hentzenwerke. Visual FoxPro 9 for Developers by Michael Cummings can be yours. The description for the book says,

Designed to help you rapidly build Visual FoxPro applications. Targeted to working software developers, we rapidly cover the basics of table design, SQL and xBase navigation. We build local views (VFP editable queries) for record editing. We quickly move into building a minimalist framework that can be used to build any size application. The material is very hands on.

I have not seen the book, so I cannot comment on it. It's self published as it comes from Lulu.com.

.. or just this blog. The new URL will be www.craigberntson.com/blog. The URL for the RSS feed will stay the same. Watch for the change in the next few days.

I just installed Virtual PC and the first "virtual" OS on my main laptop. If you aren't using it for your development and testing, you should be. VPC allows you to install an unlimited number of virtual OSes and then fire them up as needed. What's so great about VPC? How about testing new beta software like Visual Studio 2005 or SQL Server 2005? Install them on a VPC and you have isolated your production system without the cost of an additional box. How about the upcoming Longhorn beta? I understand it will run under VPC. How about for Internet browsing? Your main machine can be safe by not connecting to the Internet. How about demos? I'll be using VPC for my demos at Southwest Fox and the German DevCon. How about testing and support? Does your customer have multiple versions of Windows or other software you need to test against? While it isn't documented, VPC even supports Linux. I wonder if it will support the Mac OS once Apple moves to Intel. And, VPC is pretty inexpensive. It costs about $100, but you'll need lots of RAM. I'm now running with 2 Gigs and have allocated 512 MB to the VPC, but I do notice the hardware a bit sluggish since the CPU is only a 1.6 Gig processor. You'll also need a separate license for each "guest" or "virtual" OS.

If you're thinking about migrating from SQL Server 7.0 or 2000 to 2005, this new tool will help you out. It looks at your database and makes recommendations for changes to take advantage of new features in 2005 and alerts you to depricated features.

What is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to you? Is there really a clear definition. Martin Fowler tries to figure it out on his Bliki.

I was told at DevTeach that this was going to happen, but it totally slipped past me. David Stevenson, the editor of FoxTalk, and a heck of a great guy, is the newest Fox MVP. Congrats, David! Hope to see you at the Summit.

No, I'm not confused. My good friend and former business partner, John Koziol has announced that he's leaving the Fox team at Microsoft. He's been a tester on the past few versions of VFP and has been instrumental in making each release more stable than the previous one. He's also helped bring about some great features such as the CursorAdapter. John, your insights and efforts on VFP will be missed. I hope your replacement, Sam Zhang can do half what you did.

However, John is returning to the real world, presumably as a consultant. No word yet if John and family will be returning to Florida or staying in the Seattle area. I have an invitation to stay the weekend with them either before or after the MVP summit in September. I hope they're in Seattle when that time comes around. It'll be hard to go to Seattle via Florida.