Speakers
Click a session topic for a description of that session.
Steve Bodnar is the President of Geeks and Gurus, Inc., a software development company with offices in Detroit, MI, Kalamazoo, MI and Colorado Springs, CO.
Steve started developing FoxPro applications with FoxPro for DOS 2.0. He actively develops VFP line of business applications as well as websites using Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC and jQuery. Steve was one of the founding members of the Detroit Area FoxPro Users Group and has attended Fox conferences as often as possible since the early 1990's.
Steve has spoken at VFP conferences and user groups in Detroit, Grand Rapids, Kansas City, Toledo, Milwaukee, Sacramento and Atlanta. He's also spoken at .NET user groups, Code Camps and conferences in Grand Rapids, Raleigh, Richmond, Roanoke, Northern Virginia, Chattanooga, Philadelphia, Knoxville and The Wisconsin Dells.
Geeks and Gurus develops line of business applications and websites for small and medium sized organizations. We deliver solutions based on Microsoft technologies such as Visual FoxPro, SQL Server and .NET.
You can learn more about Steve and Geek and Gurus at http://www.geeksandgurus.com.
Sessions:
An Hour (or so) at the SPA
Expose Yourself (or How to Get Your Data on the Web)
Rick Borup is owner and president of Information Technology Associates, a professional software development, computer services, and information systems 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 and FoxPro Advisor, 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:
"Modernizing" Your VFP Apps
Multi-Track Development Strategies in DVCS
VFP Version Control with Mercurial - A Refresher
Roger Donnay is the owner of Donnay Software Designs, a Boise, Idaho firm specializing in programming and consulting in the Xbase++ language. Roger started using xBase languages in 1982 with dBASE II. His product, dCLIP, was voted "Best Clipper Add-on" by readers of Databased Advisor magazine. Roger has 12 years of experience with Xbase++ and developed the product eXpress++, a library designed specifically for Clipper-developers to leverage their knowledge of xBase dialects in a way that eases the transition from text-based to GUI. Xbase++/eXpress++ applications are now in use by thousands of end-users in the USA and Europe. Roger has been speaking at Clipper- and Xbase++ -Developer Conferences around the world since 1988.
Sessions:
Creating Graphs and Charts using RMChart
eXpress++ Workshop Part 1 (pre-conference)
eXpress++ Workshop Part 2 (pre-conference)
Owner Drawing
Hank Fay is President of Professional Systems Plus, Inc, (ProSysPlus) and Chief Technology Officer of DataWorks, Inc. His interest in enhancing software development through the use of metadata began in 1995, shortly after his book on "Event-driven Programming in FoxPro 2.5" was published. Together with Frank Camp, he wrote a tool integrating xCase with the Visual ProMatrix framework for VFP, along with libraries that supported and extended VPM. That toolset has delivered, and continues to deliver, enterprise applications world wide. Hank is a Lianja MVP for both 2012, when the award was initiated, and for 2013. Lianja is the toolset that meets his criteria for being able to provide a development platform for domain experts to create enterprise-class software that runs everywhere, on everything. ProSysPlus created the ERD tool integrated into Lianja.
Sessions:
Moving VFP Applications to the Cloud Using Lianja
Workshop on Migrating Applications to Lianja (pre-conference)
Tamar E. Granor, Ph.D., is the owner of Tomorrow's Solutions, LLC. She has developed and enhanced numerous Visual FoxPro applications for businesses and other organizations.
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 and CoDe; she currently writes for FoxRockX.
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 (to be published in 2013) and Making Sense of Sedna and SP2. Her books are available from Hentzenwerke Publishing.
Tamar is one of the organizers of the annual Southwest Fox conference and 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:
Make Thor Your Own
Office 365: An IT Department for Small Businesses
Using the VFP Debugger Effectively
Andreas Herdt was born in 1970 and graduated from his academic high school in 1990. His first contact with computer hardware was a Commodore C64 at the age of 15. However, the first contact with software was on an Apple IIe in a training course of information science. A turtle was to be moved in an area strewn with obstacles.
After he completed his academic high school diploma, Andreas started as a trainee for Air Traffic Control in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1995 he accommodated his passion for hardware and software. He studied Computer Science from the Information Science Polytechnic at Darmstadt where he focused on color electronic page setting and simulation technology. Andreas Herdt graduated in 2000 with a Master's degree. His thesis was about quality assurance for GUI applications. An internship brought him to Alaska Software where he got in touch with the Web Application Adaptor (WAA). Since then he constantly developed his appetite for more leading finally him to work for Alaska Software.
Today Andreas benefits from his experiences bringing his passion to, among other areas, algorithms for improving the Xbase++ Runtime environment. He is involved in research on multi-core scalability and transactional memory.
Sessions:
A Real World Web Application Using CXP
Real-time Web Applications Using WebSockets
Marcus Herz was born Sept.5th.1958 in Germany. He started programming with dBase and Clipper in 1988, and continued with VO and C++. For the last 15 years, he has focused on Xbase++, right from its beginning. He is an associate of DS-Datasoft GmbH in Germany together with Dieter Stelzner. DS-Datasoft is a technology- and business partner of Alaska Software. DS-Datasoft develops add-on tools for Xbase++ programmers: XClass++, AdsClass++, AFX++ and VDBU. Marcus's focus is developing software for various branches of industry and working out relational database design.
Sessions:
Painting in the Presentation Space
Xbase++ and ActiveX
Clayton Jones lives in Florida, works as an independent applications developer, and provides programming training in Xbase++. He began programming in 1989 using Clipper and has been using Xbase++ since Summer 1997 when it was still in beta. Clayton is also the author of the Xbase++ add-on products Top-Down Library, X-DBU, X-Memo and Spell-X.
He has been a speaker at Xbase++ Developer Conferences in Europe and the U.S. since 1999.
Sessions:
Mastering Dialog Windows in Xbase++
Tips, Tricks and Secrets for Xbase++ Programming
Cathy (Pountney) Knight has been developing software for over three decades and is proud to have earned the FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. She is equally proud to have received the Microsoft Visual FoxPro MVP Award eight years in a row (until Microsoft retired the program). Cathy has also had the dubious honor of working as a subcontractor onsite in Redmond with the Microsoft Fox Team in 2001. Cathy enjoys writing articles for various Fox magazines as well as writing books. She authored "The Visual FoxPro Report Writer: Pushing it to the Limit and Beyond" and co-authored "Visual FoxPro Best Practices for the Next Ten Years" and "Making the Most of Sedna and SP2". Cathy participates and speaks at local user groups when time permits. She has spoken at numerous conferences including GLGDW, Essential Fox, Advisor DevCon, DevTeach, German DevCon, and of course, her favorite, Southwest Fox.
Email: cathy@frontier2000.com
Blog: www.cathypountney.blogspot.com
Web: www.frontier2000.com
Sessions:
Customizing Your Vertical Market Application
Teaching an Old Fox a New Trick: SQL Server
Eric Lendvai is the owner of EL Software Inc and the President of the Visual FoxPro Developers Group of San Diego for the past nineteen years. He began developing PC applications in FoxPro 1.0, and for the last fourteen years, was mainly developing Web Applications using VFP9 and jQuery while also specializing in large-scale corporate and commercial applications. Currently, Eric's main priority is to convert nearly a million lines of VFP code to xBase++.
Sessions:
Converting a Real VFP App to Xbase++
Xbase++ from a VFP Developers Perspective
Andrew MacNeill has been developing business solutions since 1990. He is a Microsoft Professional Developer and has been certified since 1994. He was a Microsoft VFP MVP for several years, until Microsoft retired the program. Andrew is the author of GENMENUX, a popular public domain tool for menu design and a project leader in VFPX, the open-source FoxPro project. He was also the host of the Fox Show, a podcast related to FoxPro and all things software development related. He is one of the developers of the Foxfire! query and report writer. Andrew has written over 100 published articles and has spoken at developers conferences around the world since 1993.
Working with government and private projects, Andrew has worked with development teams of varying sizes and locations, building great products and product strategies using FoxPro, ASP.Net, WPF, MS Office, among other development tools. As a trainer and mentor, he has taught courses both online and in-person across North America.
Web site: www.aksel.com
Email: andrew@aksel.com
Blog: http://akselsoft.blogspot.com
Sessions:
Crushing the User's Experience: Building the Right (and Wrong) UI
Moving Forward from FoxPro: Tools and Technologies for Tomorrow (pre-conference)
Jody Meyer has been a software developer for 28 years and all but 3 have been with Fox. Currently, Jody is a software developer for White Light Computing. 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 a couple of user groups. She is the President and Webmaster of the Grand Rapids Area FoxPro User Group (GRAFUG). She is a member of the Detroit Area Fox User Group (DAFUG) and has been known to make the trek to the Chicago FoxPro Users and Developers Group (ChicagoFUDG). She loves sharing her passion at conferences as well. When she isn't a taxi driver for her son, David, to Karate or some school event, Jody also loves to learn karate, play volleyball with her husband Jeff and walk with her dog, Beau. You can contact Jody at:
Email: JMeyer29@Live.com
Email: JLMeyer@WhiteLightComputing.com
White Light Computing, Inc website at www.whitelightcomputing.com
Sessions:
Customer Service: Making a Difference
Legacy Code Forensics: Answering the Questions of the Unknown
Frank Perez is a software developer in West Bloomfield, Michigan. He started his programming career in Microsoft FoxPro DOS working for a vertical market payroll and billing software company. For the last 5 years he has been working with a great team at White Light Computing, Inc., where he gets to work on a variety of projects such as FPD, VFP 7/8/9, C#, SQL Server, and ASP.NET MVC.
When Frank is not working or spending time with his family, he is out running marathons, riding his motorcycle, or renovating his house.
Sessions:
The Open Source World of Visual FoxPro
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 developer tools that improve developer productivity, or writing articles for his favorite technology journals and 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 is regular presenter at user groups across North America 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 is a regular 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 in his blog: Shedding Some Light.
Sessions:
VFPX.Edition.2013() Part 1
VFPX.Edition.2013() Part 2
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:
Unit Testing 201: Testing Our SQL Server Backends
Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Continuous Integration and VFP
Rick Strahl is president of West Wind Technologies on Maui, Hawaii. The company specializes in Web and distributed application development, training and tools with focus on ASP.NET, .NET and Visual FoxPro. Among the tools created and sold by Rick's company are West Wind Html Help Builder, West Wind Web Store, Web Monitor and Web Connection. Rick has been working with Microsoft technology close to 20 years, is an ASP.NET Insider, a frequent contributor to magazines and books and speaks frequently at professional developer conferences all over the world. He is also co-publisher of CoDe magazine. For more information please visit: www.west-wind.com, contact Rick at rstrahl@west-wind.com or check out his WebLog at www.west-wind.com/weblog/.
Sessions:
Building Mobile Web Applications with FoxPro and Web Connection
Putting wwDotnetBridge to Practical Use
Tuvia Vinitsky is a principal in Vinitsky Consulting Inc. VCI develops and markets major vertical applications for non-profit organizations and community centers (JCC, YMCA). They also provide custom 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. He 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:
Credit Cards and EFT/ACH in VFP
VFP and HTML: Running Enterprise Apps on the Web with FoxInCloud (pre-conference)
Till graduated with a Master's degree in Computer Science from the Information Science Polytechnic in Frankfurt/Main.
In 1997, Till joined Alaska Software straight from college. His primary project was the development of Xbase++ for the Windows platform. Soon thereafter, he assumed responsibilities in maintaining and enhancing Xbase++'s user interface functionalities. His special interest, and maybe therefore his strong suit are the Graphics Engine and the component library built into Xbase++ (Xbase Parts). Till is also involved in various other areas of product development at Alaska Software. For example, he is a key member in the "PolarFox" project team.
Till is a frequent speaker at various developers conferences and other events surrounding Xbase++, both in Europe and in the US. Apart from his interest in computing, Till enjoys riding his motorcycle, exercising, and reading a good book.
Sessions:
Creating Rich Desktop Applications with Xbase++ 2.0
Using HTML5 & CSS in Desktop and Web Applications