Mike Feltman
  Mike Feltman has been president of F1 Technologies since founding the company in 1990 as Neon Software. With Mike at the helm, F1 Technologies has enjoyed years of success as a consulting firm, training firm, distributor and most notably the developers of the FoxExpress line of application development tools.

Since late 1991, Mike and his wife and partner Toni Feltman have focused on the development of the award winning FoxExpress product line. Since its initial release for FoxPro for DOS in 1992, F1 Technologies has sold over 10,000 copies of FoxExpress in over 100 countries. The latest edition, Visual FoxExpress, continues to be one of the most popular frameworks available for Visual FoxPro.

Prior to the release of FoxExpress, F1 Technologies focused primarily on FoxPro training and provided training to hundreds of developers throughout North America. Mike developed courseware for and taught several popular FoxPro for DOS and Windows courses.

In addition to his work on FoxExpress, Mike is a frequent conference speaker and has spoken at conferences throughout North America and Europe on a wide variety topics. Mike’s main focus is Visual FoxPro application development, but he also speaks on object orientation, Internet application development, client-server development, the software business and other subjects. Mike has also published articles in FoxPro Advisor, FoxTalk and the Virtual FoxPro User Group’s newsletter and served as technical editor of the book “Building Visual FoxPro Applications with Visual FoxExpress” published by Hentzenwerke.

Mike is also actively involved in F1 Technologies consulting practice and has developed numerous applications for a wide variety of industries including Automotive, Healthcare, Construction and Manufacturing. Mike has been involved with a number of successful software projects for large companies such as General Motors, Mitsubishi, Libbey Owens Ford, Teledyne and others as well as many projects for small and medium sized business. Mike is heavily experienced in desktop, LAN, client-server and Internet development.

Prior to starting F1 Technologies, Mike worked at Fox Software - the original creators of FoxPro. At Fox Software Mike worked in technical support, training and marketing, developed in-house systems and performed product maintenance on the FoxCentral module in FoxBase+

Mike got his start in computers at the age of 15 as an assistant instructor at the University of Toledo and became an instructor at the University of Toledo at the age of 17. At the University Mike taught a wide variety of courses on topics including operating systems, databases, word processing and robotics. Mike also developed the University’s robotics courseware and developed a registration system for the university in FoxBase+.

Click here to reach Mike via email.


 
  Where do you want to go today?
Many VFP developers are at a point in their careers where they need to diversify and develop skills in another language/development environment besides VFP. Microsoft would like you to choose Visual Studio .NET.

For most VFP developers, myself included, learning a new language and developing a proficiency in it close to that of what they've developed in VFP, will take a major investment. While .NET is a candidate, there are many other worthy candidates. In this session, we'll look at .NET side by side with a number of other options and discuss the viability of each of them from a return on investment standpoint. We'll also discuss opportunities that remain in VFP and strategies for continuing to get a return on the long term investment VFP developers have made in their skills.

Attendees will learn:
1. Learn about various other languages and emerging technologies in the development world.
2. See side-by-side comparisons of VFP, .NET and many other development environments
3. Learn about opportunities available today to VFP developers.

Skill level: All
Suggested prerequisites: None
   
 
VFP and AJAX
One of the hottest buzzwords in the industry today is AJAX. In reality, AJAX is just a new name for good old DHTML or Dynamic HTML, and just a small subset of it at that. Recently sites like Google maps and gmail have helped to bring AJAX to the forefront. AJAX allows web developers to create rich-desktop like applications in the Browser by taking advantage of client-side events and the DOM (document object model) and by performing background communications with the web server to handle timely data retrieval and validation. With the wide variety of server side scripting tools available for it, its blazing fast database engine and its strong text handling capabilities VFP can be a strong player in the AJAX arena.

Attendees will learn how to:
1. Use AJAX to make asynchronous background calls to retrieve data.
2. Use JavaScript to update elements of web pages without redrawing the entire page.
3. Teach you how to build fast interactive web applications with all of the bells and whistles.

Skill level: All
Suggested prerequisites: Basic knowledge of VFP, HTML and the Web would all be helpful, but not required. This session will be presented in a step-by-step format, similar to a hands-on class.
 
 


Pre-Conference Session
Web 101 for Visual FoxPro Developers
Many VFP developers have been developing Internet applications for a long time. FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) have kept many others away from it. Visual FoxPro is a great fit for more Internet applications: " its data handling capabilities are of course, unrivaled, " its string handling capabilities make it handy for generating HTML " its XML support makes it well suited for data exchange " its object oriented features make it well suited for developing classes for enterprise level applications " the wide variety of 3rd party web tools for VFP make it easy for VFP developers to make the leap from the desktop to the Internet In this session we'll cover the basics of how web browsers interact with web pages, forms in web pages and data, then we'll delve into where Visual FoxPro fits with all of that. We'll also cover some do's and don'ts to help you avoid common mistakes many developers make when getting started with Internet applications. The samples we use will be created using Active FoxPro Pages, but can be easily applied to Web Connection, classic ASP pages and other relevant technologies.

Attendees will...
1. Learn how to develop web pages that retrieve and render data in Visual FoxPro for display within web pages.
2. Learn techniques for web-based data entry using Visual FoxPro.
3. Learn about web-hosting for Visual FoxPro based web-applications.

Skill Level/Prerequisites
Skill level: Any VFP skill level, little or no web skills.
Suggested prerequisites: None