Virtual Fox Fest 2020
An online conference presenting the latest in Microsoft Visual FoxPro development techniques
October 15, 21, and 27, 2020
Speakers
Click a session topic for a description of that session.
Ajit Abraham
Ajit is working as an IT Manager for Arcal WLL, one of the largest specialist manufacturer of Architectural Aluminium Products in the Kingdom of Bahrain, since 1993.
One of his roles in the company is to develop and maintain an in-house ERP system. He started with the DOS version of FoxPro and as of today, the ERP system is built on the rock-solid Microsoft VFP 9.0. Thanks to the all-in-one (data, reporting, and coding) nature of VFP, and the amazing VFP support community around the world, Ajit can handle the ERP system as well take care of all other IT needs of the company.
Currently, Ajit is supplementing the ERP system by building native mobile apps developed on the NativeScript platform with Angular as the JavaScript framework and Nodejs-VFP as the backend.
Ajit is married to Anita and they have two children, Andrew and Alena.
Sessions:
Rick Borup
Rick Borup is owner and president of Information Technology Associates LLC, a professional software design, development, and consulting firm he founded in 1993. Rick earned BS and MBA degrees from the University of Illinois and spent several years developing software applications for mainframe computers before turning to PC database development tools in the late 1980s. He began working with FoxPro in 1991, and has worked full time in FoxPro and Visual FoxPro since 1993. He is a co-author of the books Deploying Visual FoxPro Solutions and Visual FoxPro Best Practices For The Next Ten Years. He has written articles for FoxTalk, FoxPro Advisor, and FoxRockX, and is a frequent speaker at Visual FoxPro conferences and user groups. Rick is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) and a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) in Visual FoxPro.
Sessions:
Tamar E. Granor
Tamar E. Granor, Ph.D., is the owner of Tomorrow's Solutions, LLC. She has developed and enhanced numerous applications for businesses and other organizations.
Tamar is author or co-author of more than a dozen books including the award-winning Hacker's Guide to Visual FoxPro and Microsoft Office Automation with Visual FoxPro. Her most recent books are VFPX: Open Source Treasure for the VFP Developer and Making Sense of Sedna and SP2.
Tamar served as Editor of FoxPro Advisor magazine from 1994 to 2000 and was Technical Editor from 2000 to 2008. She served as co-author of the popular Advisor Answers column from 1993 to 2008. She has also written for FoxTalk, CoDe, and FoxRockX.
Tamar is one of the organizers of the annual Southwest Fox conference and of Virtual FoxFest, as well as founder of the Philadelphia Visual FoxPro User Group. In 2007, she received the Visual FoxPro Community Lifetime Achievement Award. She received Microsoft Support's Most Valuable Professional award annually from the program's inception in 1993 through 2010. Tamar speaks frequently about Visual FoxPro at conferences and user groups in North America and Europe.
You can reach her at tamar@tamargranor.com.
Sessions:
Doug Hennig
Doug Hennig is a partner with Stonefield Software Inc. He is the author of the award-winning Stonefield Query; the award-winning Stonefield Database Toolkit (SDT) (now open source); the MemberData Editor, Anchor Editor, and CursorAdapter and DataEnvironment builders that come with Microsoft Visual FoxPro; and the My namespace and updated Upsizing Wizard in Sedna.
Doug is co-author of VFPX: Open Source Treasure for the VFP Developer, Making Sense of Sedna and SP2, Visual FoxPro Best Practices For The Next Ten Years, the What's New in Visual FoxPro series, and The Hacker's Guide to Visual FoxPro 7.0 (now open source). He was the technical editor of The Hacker's Guide to Visual FoxPro 6.0 and The Fundamentals. Doug wrote hundreds of articles in 20 years for FoxRockX, FoxTalk, FoxPro Advisor, Advisor Guide to Visual FoxPro, and CoDe magazines..
Doug spoke at every Microsoft FoxPro Developers Conference (DevCon) starting in 1997 and at user groups and developer conferences all over the world. He is one of the organizers of the annual Southwest Fox conference and 2020's Virtual Fox Fest. He is one of the administrators for the VFPX VFP community extensions Web site. He was a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) from 1996 through 2011. Doug was awarded the 2006 FoxPro Community Lifetime Achievement Award.
Sessions:
Robert van der Hulst
Robert van der Hulst (The Netherlands) has been part of the IT industry since the 80's. He started developing applications in DOS with dBase, Clipper and FoxBase, C, and Assembler. Later he developed applications for Windows and .Net with C/C++, Visual Objects, Vulcan.Net, Visual FoxPro, and C#.
Robert has created several 3rd party components for Visual Objects and Vulcan developers and has been part of the Visual Objects and Vulcan.Net development team, and worked there on the compiler, IDE, runtime, and RDD system.
In 2015 Robert founded the XSharp (X#) Project, together with Fabrice Foray (France), Nikos Kokkalis (Greece) and Chris Pyrgas (Greece). They were all colleagues from the former Vulcan.Net development team who decided there was a need for an open source implementation of XBase for .Net.
The goal behind the X# project is to create an open source implementation of XBase for the .Net world with supporting runtime and tools. Since September 2015 they have created a compiler, which is based on the Roslyn source code, the source code for the C# and VB compilers. They have also create a Visual Studio integration for the X# language, a runtime which consists of XBase functions, and a RDD system which allows reading/writing various DBF formats, and some tools.
The X# compiler supports various “dialects” of XBase. At this moment there is support for the "Core" dialect (which requires no runtime at all, and is like C# with XBase syntax), Visual Objects, Vulcan, Harbour and XBase++, and FoxPro.
Robert has spoken at various conferences in Europe, Australia, and the US. He has also helped many customers to move their applications forward from one Xbase technology to another.
Sessions:
DataBinding for Xbase developers in .Net Using Windows.Forms and WPF
Joel Leach
Joel Leach is the Vice President of Development at Memorial Business Systems, Inc. where he has been employed since 2000. He has been fiddling with computers since he was a kid in the '80s, learning BASIC on an IBM PCjr. He got his first real job in 1989 and started programming with dBase III, eventually moving to FoxBase+. He now enjoys working with VFP 9 and other technologies. He accidentally fell into a management position, but still manages to spend a large portion of his time writing code. Joel is the VFPX Project Manager for ParallelFox and FoxTabs.
Joel is an electronics addict. When not programming in FoxPro, he loves watching TV with his wife, playing video games with his kids, or noodling away on his guitar.
Sessions:
Eric Lendvai
Eric Lendvai has 30 years of experience as a Software Engineer with a focus on software architecture, including designing schemas, translating business requirements into software applications, designing user interfaces, and ensuring program component interoperability. He has a highly entrepreneurial background, with 25 years as a consultant and previous clients ranging from startups to well-established organizations. Eric develops now in primarily Python and Harbour, and he specializes in cloud-based systems and web development. One of his current projects is porting 1.5 million lines of VFP code to Harbour and Python. Another is the creation and maintenance of the harbour.wiki website, which includes technical articles and reference material useful to both new and seasoned Harbour developers.
Sessions:
Andrew Ross MacNeill
Andrew MacNeill has been developing business solutions since 1990. He is a Microsoft Professional Developer (certified in SQL, VFP, Dynamics CRM, and ASP.Net) and has been certified since 1994.
Andrew is the author of GENMENUX, a popular public domain tool for menu design, a project leader in VFPX, the open-source FoxPro toolkit and is involved in other open source projects. He has managed development teams for government and private projects, producing high quality, scalable products. He translates business problems into technical solutions, communicating with both business stakeholders and technical team with ease.
Andrew has written over 100 published articles and has spoken at developer conferences around the world since 1993. He has trained several organizations in both developer technologies and end-user tools such as Microsoft Office and Dynamics CRM. He is one of the lead developers on Foxfire!, the report writing tool and most recently, has been building large scale solutions using ASP.Net and Vue for the Canadian federal government.
Sessions:
Quasar and JSON: A Full Stack Experience for the DB Developer
Jody L. Meyer
Jody Meyer has been a software developer for 30+ years and has been using Fox for all but three of them. Currently, Jody is a software developer for White Light Computing (WLC). At WLC, she works with all kinds of customers on various SQL Server/VFP applications. Previously, she was the chief architect of the WinMAGI framework, which is a world-class manufacturing ERP system for small to mid-sized manufacturers.
After hours, Jody takes her passion for software development and applies it to some volunteer projects and user groups. She is the President and Webmaster of the Grand Rapids Area FoxPro User Group (GRAFUG). She is a member and sometimes presenter with the Greater Lansing Area for SQL Server (GLASS) and SQL PASS in Detroit (SPID). She has attended a number of SQL Saturday conferences as well. You can contact Jody at JLMeyer@WhiteLightComputing.com.
Sessions:
SQL Server 2019: Implementing Security with Users, Schemas, and Roles
Les F. Pinter
Les Pinter wrote his first program (an inventory control app) in Fortran in 1970, while studying for a Ph.D. in Economics at Rice University. When his son was paralyzed by cancer of the spinal cord, Les took a leave of absense and never returned. He was teaching finance in the MBA program at the University of Houston when he and two friends from high school started a software company to develop a word processor for CP/M microcomputers. In August of 1980, he sold the source code to the Magic Wand to a 23-year-old Bill Gates, who used it as the basis for their word processor, which they called MS Word. Charles Simonyi, the Hungarian Microsoft developer who adapted the Magic Wand to work with the new Windows shell, retired with over five billion dollars worth of Microsoft stock. Les, a Hungarian moron, negotiated $35k for himself and his two partners. Some financial genius...
Since then, Les has developed software for Exxon, Shell Oil, Mitchell Energy, Halliburton, and many other companies both in the United States and abroad. Les has spoken at many Microsoft events outside of the United States, including Spain, Germany, Russia, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, and Brazil. He was once described as "having spoken at one Microsoft conference" by some idiot who apparently didn't know about the rest of the world. He has given talks on software development in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, and broken German.
Today PinterWeb, his consulting company, develops mainly in React and React Native, occasionally sinking to developing desktop apps when forced to do so by being offered money.
Sessions:
Why React is the Perfect Medium for Rewriting FoxPro Applications
John Ryan
Dr. Ryan was a practicing physician when he first encountered FoxPro 1.0 in 1991. The company he founded has used every version of FoxPro since then, including early adoption of AI, Client Server and Web technologies in the 1990s and successful participation in the Visual FoxPro beta program. Dr. Ryan continues to value certain VFP capabilities to this day and was an early beta tester and subsequently the first commercial user of the VFPA and VFP C++ Compiler add-ons for VFP9. As use becomes more widespread, Dr. Ryan remains a strong enthusiast of these tools that offer a path forward for VFP developers and products written in VFP.
Sessions:
Visual FoxPro Advanced and VFP C++ Compiler: a New Lease of Life for VFP
Rick Schummer
Rick Schummer is the president and lead geek at White Light Computing, Inc., headquartered in southeast Michigan, USA, where the team guides the customers' Information Technology investment toward success. He enjoys working with top-notch developers, thrives on the mode of continuous learning, has a passion for developing software using best practices, strives to surpass customer expectations, and shares his knowledge with others whenever he can. He is a co-founder of Forward Thinking Software, the makers of CleverFox Backup, which backs up Visual FoxPro and SQL Server data to the cloud. After hours you might find him creating tools that improve developer productivity, or writing posts on his blog.
Rick is a co-author of VFPX: Open Source Treasure for the VFP Developer, Making Sense of Sedna and SP2, Visual FoxPro Best Practices for the Next Ten Years, What's New In Nine: Visual FoxPro's Latest Hits, Deploying Visual FoxPro Solutions, MegaFox: 1002 Things You Wanted To Know About Extending Visual FoxPro, and 1001 Things You Always Wanted to Know About Visual FoxPro. He presents at user groups across North America when time allows and is founding member and Secretary of the Detroit Area Fox User Group (DAFUG). Rick is the lead organizer of the Southwest Fox Conference and the Virtual Fox Fest, and has presented at other conferences in North America, Europe, and Australia. He is one of the VFPX Administrators and a retired Microsoft Visual FoxPro MVP (2002 to 2011). Rick was awarded the FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award in October 2010.
You can contact Rick via email at raschummer@whitelightcomputing.com or via his company Web site: White Light Computing, Inc.. Read more of his thoughts on Visual FoxPro and software development, and how he runs his business on his blog: Shedding Some Light.
Sessions:
Eric J. Selje
Eric Selje is a software developer in Madison, WI. He has been programming in Fox since FoxBase 1.21 in 1986 and recalls eagerly waiting for the box from UPS with "FoxPro". In 1995 he founded MadFox, the Madison FoxPro User Group, after attending DevCon in San Diego and realizing that learning Visual FoxPro 3 would take a group effort.
Eric is professionally known as Salty Dog Solutions, LLC, developing business applications for the desktop, web, and most recently mobile devices with an emphasis on database-driven applications. He is also co-author of VFPX: Open Source Treasure for the VFP Developer.
When he's not planted in front of a screen, Eric can most often be found on the Ultimate field, the baseball diamond, solving crosswords, or with his face in a book.
Sessions:
G.N. Shah
Shah is a forward thinking, entrepreneur technology leader with twenty years of experience, delivering top notch custom solutions in large scale and enterprise business environments. His proven abilities as a technology visionary and driver of strategic business systems development brings IT to organizations enabling innovation that expands the delivery of global capabilities. Shah currently holds a programming language conversion patent with the US Patent Office. Shah's deepest expertise includes enterprise-wide architecture, application migration, IT transformation, mobile, and offshore development management. Shah holds multiple professional and technical certifications, scholastic degrees and an MBA.
In his leisure time, Shah is an avid cricket and football fan, as well as a weekly racquetball player.
Sessions:
Tuvia Vinitsky
Tuvia Vinitsky is a principal in Vinitsky Consulting. Vinitsky Consulting develops and markets major vertical applications for non-profit organizations, community centers (JCC, YMCA), and delivery management. They also provide custom database software and website development.
Tuvia's Fox experience dates back to the days of FoxBase and CompuServe. He has written for FoxTalk and has been a presenter numerous times at regional users' groups. Tuvia has always enjoyed expanding the capabilities of FoxPro, whether it was graphic printer drivers in the days of DOS or Web enabling the latest VFP 9 features.
Tuvia believes in having both breadth and depth of experience and has served as project leader for many large projects, including projects at companies like Avis-Rent-a-Car, Chicago Board of Trade, Marmon Group, and Lotus.
Tuvia and his family are long time Chicago residents. He attended Northwestern University, and is an ordained Rabbi. His years at Northwestern, with its reputation for the performing arts, must have left a mark—not only is he known for his popular presentations on software development, but he frequently is a guest speaker on Jewish philosophy and teachings.
Sessions:
Christof Wollenhaupt
Christof Wollenhaupt is a co-owner of foxpert GmbH. foxpert is one of Germany's leading FoxPro companies with offices in several states. We offer FoxPro and .NET development and consulting services as well as a number of vertical market applications in the healthcare business. More information at http://www.foxpert.com.
Christof founded foxpert in 1996. He's been a regular speaker at international conferences and user groups since 1997, an international author for half a dozen magazines, and was a contributing editor to FoxPro Advisor for a decade and a Microsoft MVP for 13 years.
Sessions:
Platinum Sponsors
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