Marcia Akins
  Marcia is an independent Consultant and software developer who for the past few years has worked primarily with Visual FoxPro and SQL Server. She and her husband, Andy Kramek own and operate Tightline Computers, Inc. from their home in Akron, Ohio. She has been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional since 1999 and also has Microsoft Certified Professional qualifications for both Distributed and Desktop Applications in Visual FoxPro.

Marcia has co-authored the Kitbox column in FoxTalk Magazine since November, 2001. Her published work also includes several articles for both FoxPro Advisor and FoxTalk magazines as well as the very successful book "1001 Things You Wanted to Know About VFP" (Hentzenwerke publishing, 2000) and “MegaFox: 1002 Things You Wanted to Know About Extending VFP” (Hentzenwerke publishing, 2002).

Speaking engagements include OzFox (Sydney, Australia, July 2003), Visual FoxPro Devcon (Prague, Czech Republic, June 2002), Essential Fox (Kansas City, 2002, 2003, 2004), Conference to the Max (Holland, 2000, 2002), Great Lakes Great Database Workshop (Milwaukee, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003), Advisor Devcon (2001, 2002), German Devcon (Frankfurt, 2001, 2002, 2003), as well as user group meetings in Europe and the U.S.

You can reach Marcia at marcia@tightlinecomputers.com
 
  Automation with VFP

Visual FoxPro is a powerful development tool, but it can't do everything on its own. An application may need to send e-mail, display graphs, send form letters, or perform complex calculations. In these cases, you can use Office automation to get results efficiently. In this session, I'll show you how to use Office automation in your VFP application and how to do so as painlessly as possible.
   
  Practical Uses of the Windows API

This session introduces Windows API programming for Visual FoxPro developers. Marcia begins by reviewing what the API is and how to translates the examples that are often in Visual Basic or Visual C++ into good old Visual FoxPro syntax. She will then present several practical examples using Windows API functions to do things that cannot be accomplished using native Visual FoxPro commands. These examples include code to read the Windows Registry and retrieve user settings from the Control Panel, code to ensure that the screen is really locked when we must manipulate the appearance of ActiveX controls in our VFP forms, and much more.