Back from fall 2005 European event tour

I arrived home yesterday from my fall 2005 European event tour. I spoke at the Visual FoxPro Developer Network event in Utrecht Netherlands, in Frankfurt at the 12th annual Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2005 in Germany, and at the Switzerland FoxPro User Group in Zurich hosted by Microsoft Switzerland. All the events were a great success, thanks to all who hosted and attended. There is another great UT conference report for the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2005 along with the usual photo archive page.

In this latest UT conference report, one of the most talked about sessions at recent VFP conference is detailed: The Technical Case and the Business Case for Visual FoxPro presented by Steven Black. For those who use VFP for non-English languages, Steve has some useful links on his web site including one article on the Middle East MSDN web site called Microsoft Visual FoxPro with Arabic Support and another hosted on his own site called Using Asian Characters in a Visual FoxPro Application.

While I was in Amsterdam, I met with many people from AccountView, who recently released a new version of their upgrade of their product based on VFP 9.0. After my meeting at AccountView, I made it over to the VS 2005 / SQL Server 2005 launch event in Rotterdam and met up with our developer division VP Soma, who has a blog at https://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/. We had a round table chat with some MVPs followed by the big local launch party event with about 1300 attendees. Based on a few repeat questions I've received from developers interested in obtaining VS 2005 and the various versions available, some useful links include the Visual Studio 2005 web site, an Express level, a trial editions, as well as via MSDN Subscriptions for Visual Studio 2005.