Southwest Fox Conference Blog

Southwest Fox Sessions and Speakers Announced

On May 1, we announced the speaker and session lineup for Southwest Fox 2008. It was even harder selecting from the outstanding list of proposals this year than it was last year, and Rick, Tamar, and I are very excited about the sessions being presented this year. There are some killer topics such as taking advantage of GDI+ in your VFP applications, creating custom report controls, profiling and refactoring code using the VFPX Code Analyst Read more…

By Doug Hennig, ago

Spreading the word

Rick, Doug and I spent last week visiting Microsoft to attend the MVP Summit (a more-or-less annual opportunity for Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals to interact with Microsoft staff). We spent some time with the organizers of the other two main VFP conferences in the world (the German DevCon , and the Prague DevCon), and a few other MVPs chatting about what we can do to increase conference attendance. We identified three main problems. The first Read more…

By Tamar Granor, ago

Session Selection Process

Today is opening day for many baseball teams here in the USA. All the players went through spring training to prove to the team management they are the best of the best and will help the team be successful during the year. All the players dream that in October they will be playing for the baseball championship. In many ways I see parallels with respect to Southwest Fox 2008. Each of the potential speakers have Read more…

By Rick Schummer, ago

Time to submit session proposals

Over the weekend, Doug updated the Southwest Fox website (www.swfox.net) to show information for this year’s conference. Simultaneously, we released this year’s call for speakers. If you think you have something to share with the VFP community, check it out at http://www.swfox.net/callforspeakers.aspx. Be sure to read the entire Call for Speakers document, as it explains our philosophy for the conference and for choosing speakers.

By Tamar Granor, ago

Southwest Fox 2008 *and* 2009

During the closing session of Southwest Fox 2007 we announced Southwest Fox 2008. Today I signed the conference center contracts for 2008 and 2009! So the announcement is official: Southwest Fox 2008 and 2009 will be held in Mesa, AZ at the Arizona Golf Resort and Conference Center (same place as 2007). The organizers knew the conference location was not going to change based on the overall terrific service the conference center staff provided to Read more…

By Rick Schummer, ago

Where was KOKOPELLI?

Happy New Year everyone. One of our questions on the evaluation form asked people to rate KOKOPELLI. One of the themes we got in the responses is “What is KOKOPELLI?” and “Where was KOKOPELLI?” Apparently we did not do a good job making the Southwest Fox schedule helper applet from Dave Aring public enough on the Web site, in our email announcements, and the RSS feed. You might not be aware that we had it Read more…

By Rick Schummer, ago

Making the schedule

I’ve prepared the session schedule for a number of conferences, including this year’s Southwest Fox, several DevCons, and at least one GLGDW. When I prepare a conference schedule, I work with a set of rules, some of which are obvious (no speaker can give two simultaneous sessions) and some of which are not (no speaker should have sessions right before and right after lunch). The goal, of course, is to create a schedule that works Read more…

By Tamar Granor, ago

The Space Race

One complaint we saw a lot on the evaluations was that a room was overcrowded for one session or another. This is actually a hard problem for us to solve. Conference room layouts fall into two basic categories: those (like this year’s Southwest) where all the rooms are the same size, and those where session rooms have different sizes. Each type presents issues for scheduling, but on the whole, it’s a lot easier when all Read more…

By Tamar Granor, ago

They like us! They really, really like us!

The title says the most important thing we learned from the Southwest Fox evaluations. Most attendees were very happy with the conference. Of 92 people who filled out the overall conference portion of the evaluation booklet, 88 said they were likely to come to Southwest Fox again in the future. That’s an incredibly high number, but matches what people told us in person. Although the overall tone of the comments was positive, nothing else had Read more…

By Tamar Granor, ago

Reporting on the overall conference data

Reporting on the overall conference evaluations was both easier and harder than reporting the speaker evaluations. Easier because we needed only a single report, with no need to break things down by speaker. Harder because instead of three open-ended questions, there were 12. My first inclination was to handle the comments as I had on the speaker evaluations, with a separate cursor and detail band for each. But 12 detail bands seemed excessive. More importantly, Read more…

By Tamar Granor, ago