Recent Adventures in Podcasting
I managed to continue my quest for over-exposure at two events in the month of October. If you have any interest in my take on software development, conferences and developer community, then check these out.
First, I sat down with Andrew McNeil of the FoxShow over breakfast in Mesa, AZ. Andrew and I were both speaking at the Southwest Fox Conference for Visual FoxPro developers. I thought the conversation came out well: FoxShow58SWFox.mp3
Next, I sat down with Chris Williams for his Nine Questions series. Chris sent me a list of questions to answer back in June, and I never responded. While he had the video camera in hand at PDC, we sat down to do the video interview. Again, I’m happy with the outcome:
Cheers,
++Alan
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
Loose Ends
I’m picking up some loose ends this week. I’ve had a couple of projects “in process”, read totally ignored, for a few months. This week I’m getting back in the groove and making progress on both of them.
First, thanks to some insistent encouragement, read nagging, from Craig Boyd, I have the VFP Build Target code up on CodePlex. The initial commit should be seen as a design document. I didn’t write the initial implementation, Paul Witt did. Paul is our configuration manager at DPRA and as such, he’s responsible for the builds.
After a conversation and an exchange of links to documentation, Paul built a working implementation of the VFP Build target to be called from Team Build. Paul discovered that the build would hang if there was a problem with the build, because VFP was showing a modal dialog. Paul set up a timer to call a separate program to kill the, now hung, VFP process.
I took Paul’s code and removed the parts specific to our build process, and attempted to simplify the structure. I also converted the build task class to C#. Now that it’s posted, I’ll create some unit tests and documentation, so others can begin playing with it.
My other loose end is my foray into the wilds of VSX. I began an earnest investigation into the new Visual Studio extensibility features, but I got sidetracked by two exciting opportunities. Neither opportunity played out, but I learned some things from the process.
Late last week, CoDe Magazine published VSX CoDe Focus magazine. You should check it out. In two weeks I’ll be doing a talk on VSX at DevLink, so I will be spending my free time making sure I’m up to speed on all the latest updates.
If you are interested in influencing the future of Visual Studio Extensibility, be sure to take the survey.
++Alan
