We have some news to share about our speaker line up for Southwest Fox 2010.

We are disappointed that Craig Boyd will be unable to present at Southwest Fox 2010; we look forward to his return in the future.

We are delighted that Jody Meyer has agreed to step in. She’ll present two topics: “Web Development using CSS – 101″ and “It’s Easy & It’s Green: PDF Output.”  Jody did a terrific job as a rookie speaker at last year’s Southwest Fox. You can learn more about Jody on our speakers page (http://swfox.net/speakers.aspx) and read all about her sessions on our sessions page (http://swfox.net/sessions.aspx).

Only five weeks until Southwest Fox!

There is still time to get in on Early Bird Registration for Southwest Fox 2010! Register before September 1st and the Early Bird discount saves you $50 over regular conference registration.

Southwest Fox is an incredible value. This year’s conference, to be held October 14-17, includes 15 speakers, 26 different sessions in the main conference, and 4 pre-conference topics. Plus, if you’re a member of a registered VFP user group, when you attend Southwest Fox, your user group receives $25.

As you no doubt know by now, we have a new venue this year:

Legado Hotel
SanTan Elegante Conference and Reception Center
1800 S. San Tan Village Parkway
Gilbert, Arizona 85296

1.888.MyLegado
1.888.695-3423
480.809.4100

Room rates are “run of the house” at $119 a night. You can find all the details at http://swfox.net/hotel.aspx. The room block for the conference is held through September 13th; after that room availability and pricing is determined by the hotel.

We are planning to add a “Show Us Your App” bonus session based on the success of the session the last couple of years.

Got suggestions? info@swfox.net
Got questions? info@swfox.net
Got registrations? register@swfox.net

Or you can call the Geek Gatherings’ World Headquarters at 586.254.2530.

Read about the registration process and get the registration application here: http://www.swfox.net/register.aspx

Check out our list of amazing speakers: http://www.swfox.net/speakers.aspx

Dig into our seven session tracks: http://www.swfox.net/sessionstrack.aspx

Use our brochure to convince your boss (or spouse or SO) to let you go: http://www.swfox.net/brochure.pdf

Only 48 days until we meet in Gilbert. We hope to see you there.

Kevin Ragsdale blogged about two good reasons to attend Southwest Fox this year. His reasons were the previews Bo Durban and Steve Ellenoff give for their Southwest Fox sessions. I especially liked these comments:

“During Bo’s session, my mind was spinning with new ways of approaching the web browser control in my apps. I couldn’t wait to get home so I could start working on them. Some of them I’ve already tried, and the speed increase on displaying HTML in my app is incredible. And this means Bo’s session alone is worth the cost of the conference to me.”

“In short, Steve’s done a ton of work that I have avoided like the plague.”

Of course, I think there’s a lot more than two good reasons: more like 200! One for each session (you learn a lot in each one), one for each speaker (you get to hang out with and pick the brains of the brightest VFP developers on the planet for free!), one for each attendee (networking with other developers is one of the most important reasons to attend any conference), plus the food, the fun (don’t forget go-karts this year!), and the gorgeous Phoenix weather.

If you haven’t already registered for Southwest Fox, check out the session line-up and who else is coming that you might like to meet or renew acquaintances with, then sign up for Southwest Fox before the September 1 early-bird deadline.

We have a big change for Southwest Fox we need to share with you.

For the last three years, we have held Southwest Fox at the Arizona Golf Resort and Conference Center. Until recently we expected this would be true for Southwest Fox 2010 as well. Due to a change in the ownership of the Arizona Golf Resort, we have made the difficult decision to relocate.

We are happy to announce Southwest Fox 2010 is packing up and moving a little south to the new SanTan Elegante Conference & Reception Center and Legado Hotel in Gilbert, Arizona.

We are excited about this upgrade in facilities. The hotel and conference center are brand new. Additionally, the room rate of $119 a night is less than last year’s lowest rate. There is a nice mall with lots of great restaurants within a mile of the hotel and conference center.

Legado Hotel and SanTan Elegante Conference and Reception Center
1800 S. San Tan Village Parkway
Gilbert, Arizona 85296
1.888.MyLegado
1.888.695-3423
480.809.4100

We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause anyone, but it was a necessary change.

In deciding to change venues, we considered a number of important factors. Some people have already booked flights to Phoenix, or have made other plans during and around the conference. Changing the conference dates or moving to a different city would have been unfair to them.

Same great Visual FoxPro conference, wonderful new location. We hope you share our excitement and look forward to learning, sharing and camaraderie in our new home. See you in Gilbert in October.

http://www.swfox.net

Southwest Fox 2010 SuperSaver deadline approaches

Your opportunity to save big on registration for Southwest Fox ends soon.

Super-saver registration offers $125 off the price of the conference, and gives you one free half-day pre-conference session, for total savings of $224. In addition, you’ll be eligible for drawings of three $150 scholarships, a copy of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN ( a $11,899 value), a license of Stonefield Query SDK (a $6,000 value), and a license for Studio Controls for COM from DBi Technologies (a $749 value). But hurry, because the super-saver offer expires on July 1.

Two 2010 Ceil Silver Ambassadors named

Thanks to the generosity of the VFP community, we have enough money to bring two developers to Southwest Fox as 2010 Ceil Silver Ambassadors. Geek Gatherings is pleased to announce that César Chalom and Bernard Bout have been selected as the ambassadors for Brazil and Australia, respectively.

FoxShow Interview

Listen to Andrew MacNeill interview Rick Schummer, Tamar Granor, and Doug Hennig about Southwest Fox 2010 on the FoxShow #65.

Since we started running Southwest Fox, White Light Computing, Rick Schummer’s company, has offered one or more scholarships, to reduce costs for a few Southwest Fox attendees. This year, my company, Tomorrow’s Solutions, is offering a new scholarship.

I have a theory that going to the first conference is the hardest, so this scholarship is open only to those who haven’t attended Southwest Fox in the years that Rick, Doug and I have run it (that is, since 2007). To be eligible, you must register by July 1. After that date, one new attendee will be randomly chosen and Tomorrow’s Solutions will send a check for $150 to help defray the cost of the conference.

If you’ve never to Southwest Fox in the Geek Gatherings era, please consider this just one more reason to join us.

As we’ve done in the past, we’re giving user groups a chance to benefit from Southwest Fox and hoping that, in return, they’ll encourage their members to attend.

The deal is the same as in the past. Your group must register with us by July 1. Then, after the conference, you send us a list of your members who were paid attendees, and we’ll send you $25 for each one. Your group can use that money for whatever you choose. Full details here.

Also, we’re again encouraging our speakers to preview their sessions at user groups, so they’ll be well-rehearsed for the conference. If you’re a user group leader, don’t hesitate to get in touch with Southwest Fox speakers to set up some preview sessions. If you’re a user group member, we sure hope the discount plus what you see in previews will convince you to join us in Mesa in October.

The organizers know the biggest draw to get you to come to Southwest Fox is the sessions and the speakers who share their vast knowledge with you during your stay in Mesa. We have an extraordinary line up with some of the best minds in the Visual FoxPro Community lined up to cover some topical and interesting material. Our speakers include a mix of people who have presented at one of the six Southwest Fox conferences, and some new people who presented and even organized other Visual FoxPro conferences around the world.

Our speakers include Rick Borup, Craig Boyd, Kevin Cully, Bo Durban, Steve Ellenoff, Toni Feltman, Tamar Granor, Uwe Habermann, Doug Hennig, Venelina Jordanova, Paul Mrozowski, Cathy Pountney, Rick Schummer, Rick Strahl, and Christof Wollenhaupt.

You can find more details on our speakers page.

There are 24 conference sessions, 4 pre-conference sessions, and 4 post-conference sessions offered in seven different tracks. Please check them out. We believe you will be challenged figuring out how you can see all the sessions you want in the time we spend in Mesa. Fear not though, each speaker is providing an organizer mandated white paper for each session they present so you have reference material to read when you return back to the office.

We have a couple of new tracks this year with the Web Development and a Post-Conference track. The Web Development track is a direct response to feedback given to the organizers last year.

Based on last year’s attendance and expenses, we plan to offer three simultaneous sessions rather than four. If early registration warrants, we will select additional speakers and add a fourth session room. So please help us offer you even more content by registering early and by inviting and convincing other Visual FoxPro developers to attend this year’s conference.

In the coming weeks we will be blogging about some of the plans we have for Southwest Fox 2010.

For some reason it feels unbelievable there are only 160 days until we gather in Mesa.

Our blog entries have been processed through Blogger and FTP’ed to the Southwest Fox Web server since we started the blog back in November of 2007. Blogger announced they no longer are supporting the FTP posters so we moved our blog to a new engine. Today this was accomplished!

We are now using Wordpress as the blogging engine and the initial impressions are positive.

So please be patient as we go clean up the links and the get everything migrated to Wordpress, and thanks for your support of the Southwest Fox conference.

Out the window of my office, I see snow adding a new layer over the remains of the back-to-back blizzards that hit the Middle Atlantic states earlier this month, but at Geek Gatherings, we’re already focused on next fall. Today, we’re posting the Call for Speakers for Southwest Fox 2010, along with the updated proposal submission application.

Last year, we set a new record for the number of speaker and session proposals we received . If that happens again this year (as we, of course, hope it will), we’ll find our decisions even tougher than before.

The attendance at Southwest Fox 2009 declined more than we expected from 2008. We suspect that reflects both the difficult economy (many previous attendees we talked to said there was nothing in the 2009 budget for training) and that there are fewer VFP developers than in the past. Thanks to tremendous cooperation from the Arizona Golf Resort, that decline in attendance didn’t result in a corresponding financial loss for Geek Gatherings.

We plan to continue offering Southwest Fox as long as the community wants it and we can make the economics work. To make sure they do for Southwest Fox 2010, we’re trying something new for speaker selection. We will initially select enough speakers to run simultaneous sessions in three rooms, rather than four. If early registration warrants, we’ll add speakers and sessions for a fourth room.

This offers a challenge for both prospective speakers and those planning to attend. For speakers, the challenge is obvious. Competition will be tougher up front, so hone your proposals, offer us plenty of choices, and in general, try to make yourself stand out. (Be sure to read through the whole Call for Speakers before preparing your proposals and make sure you can meet the deadlines.)

What’s the challenge for attendees? Register early, and encourage others to do the same. In order to give the added speakers enough time to prepare, we’ll have to make our decision in early July. As always, we’ll offer other incentives for registering early.

We know that Southwest Fox is a tremendous value and vow that, whether we have three rooms or four, attendees will still get their money’s worth.