Southwest Fox Conference

Southwest Fox hiatus until 2021

We’re disappointed to announce that due to COVID-19, the annual Southwest Fox Conference is on hiatus in 2020. However, we’re excited to offer you Virtual Fox Fest, an online conference presenting the latest in Microsoft Visual FoxPro development techniques and interoperability with other technologies. This conference provides a venue for VFP experts to come together virtually to learn more about how our fellow programmers are using and extending VFP. For details about Virtual Fox Fest, please see https://virtualfoxfest.com.

We’ve issued the Call for Speakers for Virtual Fox Fest. If you are interested in presenting, please read the document referenced in that page and consider submitting sessions. If you previously submitted sessions for Southwest Fox 2020, you don’t need to resubmit for Virtual Fox Fest (but feel free to delete or revise your prior submissions or submit new sessions).

We understand you’re probably not thinking much beyond the next few weeks or months, but we’re still planning Southwest Fox 2020 on the assumption that the current crisis will be over by November. In light of that, we’re extending the speaker submission deadline to Monday, April 13. If you have something to share with our developer community, read the Call for Speakers document (http://www.swfox.net/CallForSpeakers.pdf) and then use the Submission site (https://geekgatherings.com/Submission) to send us your session proposals. We look forward to your ideas.

We’ve issued the Call for Speakers for Southwest Fox 2020. If you’re interested in presenting, please read the document referenced on that page and consider submitting sessions via the Geek Gatherings Submission Web site.

Each year, we post a list of topics suggested by attendees on the previous year’s conference evaluations in order to help people who want to submit proposals. (Here’s the 2019 list, as well as the 2018 and 2017 versions.)

Here’s this year’s list, organized and de-duped. Obviously, we welcome topics not on this list, too.

• X#
• VFP Advanced
• wwDotNetBridge
• C#, including introductory sessions
• SQL, including migrating from VFP to a SQL backend
• Multi-tenant architecture and considerations
• Web services
• The new VFPX MenuDesigner Professional
• VFPX
• More ways to use VFP

If there’s something you’re hoping we cover this year, please add it to the comments for this post.

If you’d like to be considered as a speaker for Southwest Fox 2020, please check our Call for Speakers page.

The Southwest Fox 2019 Keynote Presentation will stream using Facebook live video starting at 7:00 pm MST (10:00 PM EDT), Thursday, October 24. Kevin Ragsdale is presenting the keynote session titled “The Fox Family: A Whimsical Celebration of FoxPro and the FoxPro Community”.

Andrew MacNeill has posted the third of our FoxShow interviews. In this one, he talks with Tamar about women in tech, how she got here, and of course, Southwest Fox.

Registration for Southwest Fox 2019 has been open for a few weeks and there’s less than a week until the Super-Saver Registration deadline. If you register before the end of June, you save $125 and we’ll throw in a pre-conference session worth $99. Not only that, but you’ll be entered in the drawings for a scholarship that will reduce your cost even more and a license of Stonefield Query SDK, a $2,500 value. Check out the speakers and topics on the conference website.

Please beat the rush so we still have some fingernails left when July begins! No need to wait, we won’t charge your card or cash your check until the middle of July!

Andrew Ross MacNeill, the host of the FoxShow, interviewed each of the Southwest Fox organizers separately this year and talked to each of about how we got into computing, why we go to conferences and much more. The first two of the shows are available now.

Doug Hennig on FoxShow #84

Rick Schummer on FoxShow #85

We’ll let you know when Tamar’s interview is posted. Thanks, Andrew, as always for helping us spread the word about Southwest Fox.

Registration for Southwest Fox (http://www.swfox.net/register.aspx) is now available. See http://www.swfox.net/speakers.aspx for a list of speakers and http://www.swfox.net/sessionsswfox.aspx for a list of sessions. Super-Saver Registration, which saves you $125, is available only through June 30th, so don’t wait.

Putting on a conference is a risky endeavor. Conference centers require a guaranteed minimum income to block the dates of a conference; for a conference like Southwest Fox, that minimum is in the tens of thousands of dollars. We have to commit to the conference center by July 2nd and need your support by July 1st to make that commitment. We will not send out any “We need your help” appeals so please do not wait; register by June 30th! We know most of you like to wait until the last minute to avoid the credit card bill arriving too soon. We will not charge any attendee credit cards or cash any checks until we have committed to going forward (sometime after July 2), so this is not is a reason to wait.

We look forward to seeing you in October!

Speakers and sessions for Southwest Fox 2019 have been announced. We like to have at least one new speaker each year, and this year it’s Tracy Pearson, presenting sessions on calling VFP COM objects in C# applications and implementing automated builds for VFP applications.