Southwest Fox 2024
September 26-29, 2024
Hampton Inn & Suites Phoenix-Scottsdale
Scottsdale, AZ
Speakers
Click a session topic for a description of that session.
Tore Bleken
Tore Bleken is the owner of VFPHelp.com. He has developed applications since 1974, first in Basic, and later in dBase, FoxBase, and Visual FoxPro.
Most applications have been written for internal use in Tore's company Bleken Elektronikk, which sold electronic parts and equipment. The applications include modules for invoicing, stock management, accounting, payroll, and several other modules. When the Internet became popular, he built a website to enable the company's customers to see what it sold, and to place orders.
Since the company was taken over by his sons, he has worked for a period in Aruba and as a VFP consultant in Norway. He was a member of a small team who helped each other creating VFP tools, the team which eventually released the tool now known as Thor. One of his contributions to Thor, apart from suggesting that it be named after him, is SuperBrowse.
Over the years, Tore has attended close to thirty VFP conferences and events all around the world. He spends much of his time helping others with VFP related problems, and in 2017 he was awarded VFPX Administrators Outstanding Services Award.
Sessions:
Rick Borup
Rick Borup is owner and president of Information Technology Associates, LLC, a professional software design, development, 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 in the commercial banking industry before turning to PC database development tools in the late 1980s. He has worked full time in FoxPro and Visual FoxPro since 1993 and with SQL Server since 1998. Rick 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:
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. He also created several VFPX projects, including Project Explorer, OOP Menu, OOP Reports, and SFMail.
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 Hacker's Guide to Visual FoxPro 7.0 (now open source). He was the technical editor of 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 Southwest Fox and Virtual Fox Fest conferences. 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:
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+ and FoxPro. He now enjoys working with VFP 9, .NET, Angular, TypeScript, 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 DotNet2Fox, ParallelFox, FoxTabs, BindWinEvent, and Fox Containers.
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:
Shonnon Morris
Shonnon Morris has been a Fox developer for over 30 years. He actually started with FoxBase in High School and thought, "This is cool, I must pursue this for the future", and has never looked backed since then.
Shonnon has a software development company that produces three vertical market applications that are currently in use in about 10 countries throughout the Caribbean.
Sessions:
Jim Nelson
Jim Nelson spent the first thirty years of his professional life programming in APL, a long-since extinct programming language. During those years, he earned a reputation throughout the APL community for building tools to aid in the development of APL systems.
His VFP career began in 2003, working for the Kong Company in Golden, Colorado, in inventory and financial applications.
His involvement in VFPX projects (Thor, PEM Editor, IntellisenseX, Finder, FoxCharts, and so on) mirrors his long time interest in developing programmers' tools. He was a presenter at SWFox in 2009. 2011, 2014, and 2023.
Jim lives in Newbury Park, California, with his wife of 51 years.
P.S: It seems he is yet to understand the meaning of the word "retire".
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 focuses mainly on web development these days, with a focus on West Wind Web Connection, and frequently posts insightful, some may say life-changing, thoughts and hilarious memes about a multitude of subjects on Facebook.
Sessions:
Scott Rindlisbacher
Scott is the senior developer/CTO at CentralPoint Solutions where they develop software for construction companies. Their software manages everything from quoting to invoicing, dispatching and mobile apps, as well as a full-blown accounting module. Late to the game, he started coding in VFP in 2016. He has experience with Android Java / iOS Swift code but mostly deals with JavaScript and VFP on a day-to-day basis.
He and his family live in Fountain Green, UT and love spending time at the lake or camping. He served a 2-year LDS mission in Seattle, WA and went to Southern Utah University where he graduated with a degree in Finance which he uses to help the financial side of the software they write.
Sessions:
VFP.Webify(): Tips & Tricks for Moving (Updating & Upgrading) a VFP App to the Web
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:
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, 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 and Virtual Fox Fest conferences, 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:
Eric J Selje
Eric has been programming in Fox since FoxBase 1.21 way back in 1986 when a friend showed him what dBase could be. He recalls eagerly awaiting the box from UPS with "FoxPro". In 1995, after attending Microsoft DevCon in San Diego and realizing that learning Visual FoxPro 3 would take a group effort, he immediately founded MadFox, the Madison FoxPro User Group which is still going strong!
Although currently focusing on cybersecurity issues, he still consults on the side as Salty Dog Solutions, LLC. He work with businesses and nonprofits to solve their database and IT Security solutions.
Eric is thrilled to continue working with the Fox community, whether it's presenting, writing, or interacting with others online.
When he's not planted in front of a screen, Eric can most often be found playing Ultimate or baseball, solving word puzzles, reading, or his latest hobby, woodworking.
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:
Revisiting wwDotnetBridge and .NET Interop from FoxPro in the Modern Age of .NET
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 an owner of foxpert GmbH. foxpert is one of Germany's leading FoxPro companies. We offer FoxPro, .NET, and web development and consulting services. 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:
Platinum Sponsors
Diamond Sponsors
Gold Sponsors
