Meeting Recap for November 2004

Announcements

 Ø       VFP 9.0 is scheduled to be released by the end of 2004. Of course, what this means is if you have an MSDN subscription, you can download it as soon as it’s ready. If you plan to purchase VFP by itself, it will take another few months to go through the manufacturing process and hit the streets. Therefore, it probably won’t be available until February 2005.

Ø       Conferences

 1.       Southwest Fox was a great success. It took place last month in Tempe , Arizona , on the campus of Arizona State University . Plans have already been made for next year. Mark your calendars for October 13-16, 2005.

2.       The Advisor DevCon’s website shows dates for next year. The conference will take place June 12-16, 2005, in Las Vegas . I think it’s at the same hotel as 2004, but don’t hold me to this. Several other Advisor conferences run at the same time so you can cross over to other sessions if you want to.

3.       No official announcements have been made for a 2005 DevEssentials in Kansas City .

Elections

It’s that time of year again to hold GRAFUG elections. This will be done at our December 2004 meeting. Only paid members may participate. If you are unable to attend, but would like an absentee ballot, just send me an email with your votes and I’ll submit them at the meeting.

Incumbents

President: Mike Potjer

Vice President: Martha Kroll

Secretary: Cathy Pountney

Treasurer: Mike Potjer

Webmaster: Martha Kroll

Mike Potjer has declined to run for President again, but will still volunteer to be Treasurer.

Cathy Pountney has volunteered to continue as Secretary. She has also volunteered for President.

No other official volunteers put their hats in yet.

If you would like to volunteer for a position, or have a nomination you’d like to make, please send me an email. I’ll try to compile all the information and include it in the meeting reminder so absentee ballots will have something to vote for.

Main Presentation

Mike Potjer did a great presentation on the Mediator class we use in our application. The concept consists of creating a Mediator object. Next, you “register” other objects with the Mediator which consists of telling it what “message” it should respond to and what action it should take when the message is received. The final step is to “Send” a message to the Mediator. Once a message is sent to the Mediator, the Mediator determines which objects have registered to listen for that message and then it invokes the registered action.

An example of how to use this is when you have two controls on a form and one object needs to disable itself based on the value of the other object. Object #1 registers itself to respond to the “Whatever Changed” message and to invoke it’s Refresh() method. Object #2 sends the “Whatever Changed” message in it’s Valid() method. Object #1 has code in the Refresh() method that figures out whether to disable the control.

This concept allows you to have objects respond to other objects without having to explicitly have object names in the code. For example, you don’t have to put code in the Valid method of Object #2 that says ThisForm.Pageframe1.Page2.cmdWhatever.Enable = .t.. This helps encapsulate code and makes it a lot easier to copy controls from one form to another without having to change a bunch of code!

Mike will make the sample code available on our website soon.

Upcoming meetings

December 11, 2004:

Bill Anderson , president of the LA Fox User Group, will be traveling to Grand Rapids to make a presentation to us. The topic is, “Using Software Design Patterns”.

As an added bonus to the December meeting – Mike Timpe has volunteered to bring homemade blueberry and banana nut muffins!!!!! 

Wow – a speaker from LA, homemade muffins, and elections!! December should be a packed meeting!!!

Future:

Ø       We are still trying to coordinate having David Stevenson come in and talk with us, but his schedule keeps clashing with ours. I talked with him at DevCon and he is still interested, but we have to find a month that works out for everyone.

Ø       Frank Dolinar has volunteered to do a presentation on West-Wind Web Connection.

Ø       I’ve had Mike Levy agree to do a presentation on whatever SQL thing we want, but his schedule is up in the air right now and he can’t commit to anything yet. As soon as his schedule solidifies, we’ll be able to coordinate something.

Ø       Jim Duffy is interested in discussing DotNetNuke, so that’s another possibility we can work on if anyone is interested.

Ø       Craig Berntson has volunteered to make a presentation to our group. I just have to coordinate his schedule with ours.

Ø       A request was made to have a presentation about using the VFP IDE. I have a session that I’ve done at several conferences called “Hidden Secrets of the VFP IDE” that seems to fit this purpose. If anyone else is interested, let me know and I’d be happy to present this.

Ø       We discussed “FoxCast.org” which is a site that allows you to do webinars. We’re going to research what is available and see if any of these topics are of interest to our group. This would allow us to do a presentation without having to pay for a speaker to travel to Grand Rapids . Great concept!!!

Please let me know which of these topics interests you the most. That will help me figure out which ones to focus on. If you have another topic or speaker you’d like to see, please let me know. And as usual … if you’d like to present something, please let me know.

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Cathy Pountney
Microsoft Visual FoxPro MVP
Optimal Solutions, Inc.
www.optimalinternet.com
www.evideon.com
pountneyc@optimalinternet.com

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