DevBlog

Have you ever wondered what the Microsoft MVP program is about or how MVPs are selected? Toby Richards, who runs the MVP program at Microsoft, talks about. http://cli.gs/9MU5Hr

Speaking a conferences is a very time consuming prospect. You need to put great effort into the material to ensure it matches the expectations of the audience. Code needs to be tested. And then there are the practice sessions, preferable in front of a live audience.

But conference preparation starts long before any of that. You need to first come up with several topics because conference organizers generally ask potential speakers for more than one topic. A catchy title helps. Several years ago, I had one called "OOP, I Did it Again", that was an introduction to Object Oriented Programming. You then have to come up with a description, bullet points that hit the highlights of the presentation, figure out if it's a 100, 200, 300, or 400 level talk, and what pre-requisites are needed. Then, you need to put your proposal into the format needed by the conference organizers. So, by the time you've done this for three or four topics, you have easily spent several hours.

For the past three years, I've done this for Southwest Fox, but have not been accepted as a speaker there. So, I've decided to no longer submit proposals for the conference. I have no doubt there will be great presentations and it will be a fantastic conference, but it's no longer an effective use of my time.

I probably won't be there as an attendee either. My company has no training budget this year and it really is cost prohibitive for me to foot the bill myself.

I wish the Rick, Doug, and Tamar all the best for this year?s Southwest Fox and for many years to come.

When working in Visual FoxPro, functions are procedures are almost the same thing. Look at the following code:

FUNCTION DoSomething
LPARAMETERS Param1, Param2
? "Param 1= " + Param1
? "Param 2= " + Param2

PROCEDURE DoSomethingElse
LPARAMETERS Param1, Param2
? "Param 1= " + Param1
? "Param 2= " + Param2

The function and procedure are actually identical. The difference to determine whether you have a function or procedure is not how they are defined, but how they are called. You can even call them the same way.

DO DoSomething WITH "Hello", "Procedure"

DoSomething("Hello", "Procedure")

You'll notice that DoSomething was defined as a procedure, but we can call it as either a procedure or a function. We can do the same thing with DoSomethingElse.

The difference is how the parameters are passed. When called as a procedure, the parameters are passed by reference. When called as a function, the parameters are passed by value. You can change how they?re passed in a function with SET UDFPARMS TO REFERENCE but you can?t change how parameters are passed when calling the routine as a procedure.

So, which should you use? I think you should always call the routine as a function because the routine cannot accidently change the value of the parameter. This is the kind of nasty side effect that can be difficult to track down.

Labels: VFP

Microsoft has scheduled two events in Salt Lake City in May.

The first is XAMLFest, coming up on May 1
Are you excited about the WPF but concerned about the learning curve? Have you seen Silverlight but don’t know where to get started? Or are you curious about how tools like Visual Studio and Expression Blend help designers and developers work together to deliver great user experiences? If so, join us at XamlFest! XamlFest is an interactive event where you’ll learn about the platforms, tools, and processes used to deliver differentiated user experiences. It’s a chance for you to mingle with UX-minded Microsoft folks. To register, please send an e-mail with the names and e-mail addresses of your attendees to xamlfest-slc@live.com. Come as you are - leave xamlized!

The second is MDSN Unleashed Presents: The Best of MIX is scheduled for May 6. It will be three different topics offered in two sessions. You only need to sign up for one session and get all three topics for the price of one!

What’s New in Silverlight 3?
Are you interested in building business-focused Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)? Would you like to take advantage of 3D in the browser, but assume it is too hard? Have you wanted to take a Silverlight application offline? Then this session is for you. We will explore and illustrate the new features of Silverlight 3, including the following:

• Support for perspective 3D
• Offline Support
• .NET RIA Services which simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms

Building Web Applications with Windows Azure
This session will begin with a brief overview of Azure and discuss some of the announcements made at MIX. We will then illustrate through demo how to build a Windows Azure application from the ground up. We will illustrate how to consume Azure Table Storage, how to host services, web pages and Silverlight components, as well as how to deploy your solution to the cloud.

MVC 1.0 vs ASP.Net Webforms
Have you heard about the new ASP.NET MVC framework from Microsoft and wondered what it was all about? Are you curious whether this replaces ASP.Net WebForms? Well in this session you will learn how to use the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern to take advantage of your favorite .NET Framework language for writing business logic in a way that is de-coupled from the views of the data. In addition, we will talk about the pros and cons of both MVC and Web Forms, how to determine the best choice for a specific project, various techniques and patterns used to build MVC applications vs. Web Forms applications, and the implications for using each approach.

The morning session is from 8:00 am to 12:00 pm. Register here.
The afternoon session runs from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm. Register here.

All events are free and will be held at the Microsoft office in the International Center, 123 Wright Brothers Drive, Suite 100.

Labels: Microsoft, Salt Lake City