Southwest Fox 2023
October 19-22, 2023
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 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.
After the company was taken over by his sons, he 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 create 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 Fox Fest, 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:
Robert van der Hulst
Robert van der Hulst (The Netherlands) has been part of the IT industry since the 80's. He started developing applications in DOS with dBase, Clipper and FoxBase, C, and Assembler. Later he developed applications for Windows and .NET with C/C++, Visual Objects, Vulcan.NET, Visual FoxPro, C#, and X#.
Robert has created several third party components for Visual Objects and Vulcan developers and has been part of the Visual Objects and Vulcan.NET development team, and worked there on the compiler, IDE, runtime, and RDD system.
In 2015, Robert founded the XSharp (X#) Project, together with Fabrice Foray (France), Nikos Kokkalis (Greece), and Chris Pyrgas (Greece). They were all colleagues from the former Vulcan.NET development team who decided there was a need for an open source implementation of XBase for .NET.
The goal behind the X# project is to create an open source implementation of XBase for the .NET world with supporting runtime and tools. Since September 2015 they have created a compiler, which is based on the Roslyn source code, the source code for the C# and VB compilers. They have also created a Visual Studio integration for the X# language, a runtime which consists of XBase functions, and a RDD system which allows reading/writing various DBF formats, and some tools.
The X# compiler supports various “dialects” of XBase. At this moment there is support for the “Core” dialect (which requires no runtime at all, and is like C# with XBase syntax), Visual Objects, Vulcan, XBase++, and FoxPro.
Robert has spoken at various conferences in Europe, Australia, and the US. He has also helped many customers to move their applications forward from one XBase technology to another. He has also spoken (as vendor) at Southwest Fox 2019 and online on two Virtual Fox Fest events.
Sessions:
Creating Applications for the Web and Mobile using Blazor and FoxPro
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:
Jody L. Meyer
Jody Meyer has been a software developer for more than 30 years and has been using Fox for all but three of them. Currently, Jody is a software developer for White Light Computing (WLC). 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 user groups. She is a member and sometimes presenter with the Greater Lansing Area for SQL Server (GLASS) and SQL People in Detroit (SPID) groups. She has attended a number of SQL Saturday, GroupBy, and EightKB conferences as well. When she isn't a taxi driver for her son David to Mr. Cooke's softball games and to church, Jody loves teaching karate, learning to play the guitar, speaking at church conferences, playing beach volleyball, bicycling with her husband Jeff, and walking with her dogs Behr and Indy. You can contact Jody at JLMeyer@WhiteLightComputing.com. White Light Computing, Inc website: www.whitelightcomputing.com
Sessions:
Jim Nelson
Jim Nelson spent the first thirty years of his professional life programming in APL, a long-since extinct programming language. For the last twenty of those years, he worked as a full-time employee for a company that sold workers' compensation self-insurance. 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. He works full-time for them, acting as their software development department, primarily in inventory and financial applications.
His involvement in VFPX projects (including Thor, PEM Editor, IntellisenseX, GoToDefinition, GoFish, Object Explorer, Finder, and FoxCharts) mirrors his long time interest in developing programmers' tools. He was a presenter at SWFox in 2009, 2011, and 2014.
Jim lives in Newbury Park, California, with his wife of 50 years.
Sessions:
Optimize Your IDE: Take Full Advantage of Thor Tools Part 1
Optimize Your IDE: Take Full Advantage of Thor Tools Part 2
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, or 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 Conference and Virtual Fox Fest, 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 he attending Microsoft DevCon in San Diego and realizing that learning Visual FoxPro 3 would take a group effort, 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:
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:
Platinum Sponsors
Diamond Sponsors
Gold Sponsors
