Southwest Fox Day 1
I flew into Phoenix Thursday, and lost most of the day to travel + jet lag. I did get to hang out with Craig Boyd and Bo Durban briefly. Bo and I made a trip to the airport to pick up Dave Bernard. Bo rented a sweet Shelby Mustang convertible for the week, so it was a fun trip.
Friday morning I was up at 5:00 am. Traveling west makes me feel super human. 
I wanted to be certain that I had everything ready for my afternoon pre-conference session on test-driven development (TDD). My concern was that I might not have enough material to fill four hours. As it turned out, I could have filled an extra hour or two!
Apparently my preparation payed off for attendees. I got lots of positive feedback on the session. Steve Bodnar has a very flattering review here. I really enjoyed making the audience tell me what to type. I let them set the requirements, then reason about how best to tackle the problem using TDD. I had blast, and I’ll probably continue to do talks on agile methodologies.
At the speakers meeting, I was surprised to hear that I would be giving a keynote address with Craig Boyd! I’ve never shied away from an opportunity to get in front of a crowd, but I thought that I might hear of this before the day of the event! Craig and I spent the next hour getting our ideas together, and talking ourselves into a frenzy. We are both totally stoked about the project we are working on.
Our project is called VFP Studio. We are using the Visual Studio 2008 Isolated Shell to build an IDE for building Visual FoxPro projects inside Visual Studio. We have plans to include reg-free COM for enabling click-once deployment of Visual FoxPro applications. We are working on a VFP project type, so that we can add a new or existing VFP project to a Visual Studio solution. We keep coming up with exciting possibilities for this project, and we will be announcing more soon.
While the other two keynote demos were definitely more mature than ours, I’m very excited that we were able to take this opportunity to announce what we are working on. By announcing the project last night, we were able to reach the most people who would use VFP Studio in one room. Ken Levy, former Visual FoxPro PM and current community program manager on the Visual Studio Ecosystem team, was present at the keynote, and helped clarify what Craig and I were doing for curious attendees during the reception. I can’t wait to see what we have to share at next year’s Southwest Fox conference.
My conference photo album is here.
++Alan
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Hi Alan,
You only have Craig Boyd to thank for being informed about the keynote. He asked if the two of you could have some time in the keynote two weeks before the conference. You guys did a great job. Thanks.
Rick
[From France]
Congratulations and many thanks for developping VFP Studio.
I still believe in VFP re/sur/vival, and you make me believe even stronger.
I wish I could SET HELP ON you
Th N
VERY VERY exciting … can’t wait.