Virtual Fox Fest 2021
An online conference presenting the latest in Microsoft Visual FoxPro development techniques
October 14, 20, and 26, 2021
Speakers
Click a session topic for a description of that session.
Bo Durban
Bo Durban is the owner of Zoom Geeks, LLC, a software company that develops custom add-ons for Sage accounting software. Bo has been working with FoxPro since 1992 starting with version 2.6 for DOS, Windows and Mac. Bo co-authored the GDIPusX library for Visual FoxPro developers located on the VFPX web site. Bo has also developed web applications with a focus on security and performance for the banking industry, construction industry and the automotive industry.
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 or through www.tomorrowssolutionsllc.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. 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. 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:
John Kullmann
John is Vice President of Technology Solutions for Macrosoft. In that capacity, he works with new and existing clients to clearly understand their requirements and translate them for the software development teams. John has extensive experience in Six Sigma, Lean Engineering and managing international operations. His background has allowed him to be responsible for ensuring ongoing client satisfaction. John consistently provides excellent customer service, ensuring the highest quality.
John collaborates with all members of the leadership and operation teams, during the creation of new services. He is Macrosoft’s corporate face, ensuring our messaging and content represent the high-tech, high-quality of Macrosoft.
John is a frequent speaker at industry events and is the Chairman of the Morris County Chamber of Commerce Tech Talk Forum.
Though John always takes his work very seriously, he does not take himself so serious. Outside of work, John sits on the Board of Directors for Family Nature Summits. Additionally, he plays tennis and enjoys every outdoor activity.
Sessions:
VFP Migration Real-World Project Stories - Interactive Panel Pitfalls, Obstacles and Best Practices
Joel Leach
Joel Leach is the Chief Technology Officer 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:
Chris McGuinness
Chris McGuiness has always been interested in how things fit together. This interest has led him into a career where he occasionally writes code but predominantly designs system architectures, workflows, and user interfaces. These architectural designs have found their way into everything from wafer handling systems for the semiconductor industry to lifesaving biometrics and intervention care communications for the battlefield.
The emergence of APIs and Infrastructure-as-a-Service has created a wonderful new set of Legos to be snapped together in fascinating fashion.
Chris has had the great fortune to spend the last decade-and-a-half working with Black Mountain Software where he has served as the Director of Engineering for the last several years.
Sessions:
Integration of Modern Development Stacks Within an AWS Hosted FoxPro Ecosystem
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 a member and sometimes presenter with the Greater Lansing Area for SQL Server (GLASS) and SQL People in Detroit (SPID) groups. She has attended a number of SQL Saturday, GroupBy and EightKB conferences as well. When she isn't a taxi driver for her son, David to Mr. Cooke's softball games and church, Jody loves teaching karate, learning to play the guitar, speaking at church conferences, playing beach volleyball and bicycling with her husband Jeff and walking with her dogs Behr and Indy. You can contact Jody at: Email: JLMeyer@WhiteLightComputing.com White Light Computing, Inc website at www.whitelightcomputing.com
Sessions:
SQL Server Reporting Services – New Beginnings for the VFP Developer
Tracy Pearson
Tracy Pearson is a software developer who has been programming with Visual FoxPro for over 20 years. For the last 16 years, he has maintained and enhanced a vertical market application with over 16,000 customers. He has led and presented at local user groups in Asheville, North Carolina. Before programming, he built computers, worked on Novell and NT networks, and did software testing for OS/2 Warp. Some of the languages he’s worked with have been Assembly, C, C++, C#, REXX, and Visual Basic.
For adventures, he hikes in the Western North Carolina mountains with his girlfriend. He does not do social media, and has no Facebook or Twitter account. If you want to reach him, email him.
Sessions:
Kevin Ragsdale
Kevin Ragsdale is an independent software developer/consultant, creating commercial Visual FoxPro applications since 2007 (full-time since 2009). He has worked with FoxPro since 1993 (starting with FoxPro 2.6 for Windows and continuing through Visual FoxPro 9.0). He is the author and project manager for the Desktop Alerts project on VFPX. Kevin hosts an archived Visual FoxPro-related blog post at http://kevinragsdale.net and frequently posts insightful, life-changing thoughts, and hilarious memes about a multitude of subjects on Facebook.
Sessions:
John Ryan
Dr. John Ryan was specializing in orthopedic surgery when he stepped aside from practice in 1992 for a year (!) to develop artificial intelligence services for surgeons. One year turned into quarter of a century including two patents for artificial intelligence that reads medical records for research and peer review audit. More recently Dr. Ryan was the first commercial user of VFPA and VFP Compiler, which are third party projects to enhance/remedy faults in Microsoft's discontinued Visual FoxPro product.
Sessions:
VFP C++ Compiler: Towards Another Decade of Secure, Extensible, Portable VFP Apps
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 customer's 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. After hours you might find him creating tools that improve developer productivity, or having fun learning from YouTubers, reading, bingeing Netflix, or relaxing in his RV.
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. Rick is the lead organizer of the Southwest Fox Conference and Virtual Fox Fest, and is a presenter at other conferences in North America, Europe, and Australia. He is an administrator of VFPX, and a Microsoft Visual FoxPro MVP from 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:
Rick Strahl
Rick Strahl is the Big Kahuna at West Wind Technologies on on Maui, Hawaii. The company specializes in Web and distributed application development, training and tools with focus on .NET Technologies and Visual FoxPro. Among the tools created and sold by Rick's company are West Wind Web Connection, West Wind Internet Client Tools, Markdown Monster, West Wind WebSurge, West Wind Html Help Builder and Web Monitor. Rick has been working with Microsoft technology for 25 years, is an ASP.NET MVP and Insider, a frequent contributor to magazines and books and speaks frequently at professional developer conferences all over the world. For more information please visit: www.west-wind.com, contact Rick at rstrahl@west-wind.com or check out his WebLog at weblog.west-wind.com.
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 Hebrew Theological College, and is an ordained Rabbi. 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:
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