Rick Schummer
  Rick Schummer is the president and lead geek at his company White Light Computing, Inc., which is headquartered in southeast Michigan, USA. He prides himself in guiding his customers' Information Technology investment toward success. He enjoys working with top-notch developers; has a passion for developing software using best practices, and for surpassing customer expectations, not just meeting them. After hours he writes developer tools that improve productivity and occasionally pens articles for FoxTalk, FoxPro Advisor, and several user group newsletters.
Rick is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (VFP), and a Microsoft Certified Professional.
Rick is co-author of a new book titled Deploying Visual FoxPro Solutions, is a co-author of MegaFox: 1002 Things You Always Wanted to Know About Extending Visual FoxPro and the award winning 1001 Things You Always Wanted to Know About Visual FoxPro from Hentzenwerke (KiloFox). He is founding member and Secretary of the Detroit Area Fox User Group (DAFUG) and is a regular presenter for user groups across North America, and at GLGDW 2000-2003, EssentialFox 2002-2004, Southwest Fox 2004, and VFE DevCon 2K2 conferences.
You can reach Rick at raschummer@whitelightcomputing.com , rick@rickschummer.com , and http://www.whitelightc
omputing.com
 
  Creating and Using Real World Builders - Made Easy!

Builders are a handy way to set attributes on objects without opening up the Visual FoxPro Property Sheet or writing a line of code. How many times a day do you find yourself jumping to the Property Sheet, moving to the correct tab, and searching down the seemingly endless list to find that one property that you need to tweak? Dozens, hundreds, or does it just feel like a thousand? Builders are yet another shortcut to increasing your productivity in ways you may have not imagined. Right-click on the object, select Builder… from the menu, and let a builder do the work for you.

Builder technology has been around since Visual FoxPro 3.0, yet to this day when the topic of builders comes up in conversation amongst developers, it is usually met with blank stares. There are a number of native builders that ship with Visual FoxPro. Some are cool, some are okay, while others seem to be a little more than useless. The most important part of this technology is not the alternative property sheet user interfaces that ship with VFP, but the fact that they are extendible, even replaceable, and most of all easy to create.
This session will demonstrate builder technology inside of Visual FoxPro, how to leverage the existing builders (especially the cool ones included in VFP 8/9), and create and register your own builders (traditional and non-traditional ones). We will step through creating several builders from scratch, using the “old-fashion” builder techniques, and using BuilderB/BuilderD techniques
Visual FoxPro 9 adds some new builders and a new technology called Property Editors that work a lot like builders, but instead of the entire object, Property Editors focus on setting one property.

Attendees will learn...
1. What a VFP builder is, how it can increase your productivity, and which ones to use and which ones to avoid.
2. How VFP builder technology is integrated into the development environment and how it can be exploited for your benefit.
3. How to create and register your own builders, as well as leveraging builder technology without creating a “traditional” builder.
4. What the Builder and BuilderX properties are and how they can be useful.
5. What the BuilderB technology is and how you can take advantage of it.
6. What is a Property Editor, where are they integrated into Visual FoxPro, and how to create ones which will increase your productivity.

Skill Level/Prerequisites
Introductory to Expert developers, session will have something for all levels. Familiarity with the Form and Class Designer is a must.
   
  Get More Productive with Visual FoxPro

Rapid Application Development is a leftover buzzword from the 90’s. Are you as productive with VFP as you can be, or wish to be? How do other developers use the world’s best database application development tool to bring applications to market quicker? Are there tips I can learn to save me 10 minutes a day or an hour a week? This session will demonstrate as many tips and productivity ideas that can be crammed into a 75 minute session.

As the old saying goes, there are always three ways to accomplish something in VFP. Sometimes we only know one way and there are two other ways that are faster or better. Sometimes we don’t even know that you can accomplish certain things with the VFP. Rick is constantly amazed, even after using Visual FoxPro for more than seven years, how much he has learned just looking over the shoulder of others as they develop with this product.

VFP 9, while focused on features that effect the end user’s experience, has a number of excellent productivity enhancements. The session will have productivity tips for developers working with all versions of VFP.

Attendees will learn how to...
1. Make better use of the VFP tools: Class Browser/Component Gallery, IntelliSense Manager, Object Browser, and Task List Manager, Task Pane, Toolbox, and Code Reference.
2. Make better use of the code editors.
3. Extending the Class and Form Designers with Builders.
4. Why features like Document View, List Members, Quick Info, and Macros should be at your fingertips.
5. Use the Debugger more effectively.
6. Enhance the VFP IDE to be more productive day-to-day.
7. Developer tools that can also increase your productivity.
8. More… since there is still time before the conference convenes.
9. Background compiles
10. Project Manager shortcuts and ability to open class libraries in Class Browser.
11. Docking forms and configuring the IDE.
12. Property Sheet enhancements
13. Setting default values for new properties
14. Generating Message Logs During Project Build and Compile
15. Anything else the Fox team can throw into the product between now and the conference.

Skill Level/Prerequisites
Introductory to Intermediate developers will learn the most, but all developers can pick up tricks to add to their day to day development.
There are no prerequisites to this session.