FoxCon Toledo 2018 Conference Presentation Abstracts

Park Inn Hotel, Toledo, Ohio. January 27th & 28th, 2018

Bob Pierce               Allentown

Living in a Legacy World

Last year Bob showed a case study of automating Smooth-On Corp., a large chemical manufacturing plant in Allentown, using Visual FoxPro. This year he will delve into the issues and opportunities of the process of migrating a large legacy application while still having to maintain and actively develop it to meet current demand.  He will be discussing how the business model changes over time to transition from entrepreneurial to corporate and the role of senior (Legacy) management in transitioning the business to the next generation to ensure future growth and viability.  This session is designed to be interactive, so your input is welcome.

Dave Bernard           Atlanta

Lessons Learned from 40 Years of Software Development

Well, 39 years, to be exact. Since the late 70's, Dave has worked on many software development projects (over 75 since 2000 alone), including mainframe, minicomputer, microcomputer, and mobile platforms, for many different industries, and in multiple countries. Dave will share a number of technical and non-technical lessons he's learned over that time, some that are obvious, some that are not-so-obvious, and some that are counterintuitive and even controversial. Dave expects this presentation to have a high interaction-to-material ratio.

David Johnson          Toledo

Big Data from Automotive Assembly Errors

Electronic torque tools used in automobile production produce a large amount of data as workers and robots physically assemble a vehicle.  This data includes alarms and errors for various potential defects such as rehit bolts, cross-threaded bolts, incorrectly removed bolts, failure to achieve torque within engineering specifications, etc.  In his presentation David will reveal how an analysis of this data can yield new insights into the causes of operator errors and solutions in new quality auditing systems, both on and off the production line.

David Johnson is a Systems Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) programmer at the Toledo South Assembly Plant, which has built the Jeep Wrangler from 2006 until April. After then, the plant will retool to produce the new Jeep Scrambler pickup truck, available to consumers in mid to late 2019. The new 2018 Jeep Wrangler is now available from the Toledo North Assembly Plant.

Doug Hennig          Winnipeg

Practical Uses of wwDotNetBridge to Extend Your VFP Applications

wwDotNetBridge lets you call just about any .NET code directly from Visual FoxPro and helps overcome most of the limitations of regular .NET COM interop. This library by Rick Strahl allows you to provide .NET functionality to your Visual FoxPro applications that wouldn't otherwise be available. In this session, you'll see many practical examples that show how you can add new capabilities to your applications that would be difficult or impossible to achieve natively in Visual FoxPro.

Creating Beautiful Web Sites Easily Using Bootstrap

Laying out a web page using HTML and CSS can be challenging. Do you use the older table mechanism or CSS floats to place objects side-by-side? How do you deal with differences in browsers? And what about handling different devices: phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops?

Bootstrap is a free, open source framework for developing responsive, mobile-first web sites. It solves many problems web developers typically face and makes it easy to create beautiful web sites in record time, even for inexperienced developers.

This session shows how to get started with Bootstrap, examines using its grid system to easily layout your page elements, and discusses how Bootstrap components add attractive and functional elements to your web site. We'll do a "makeover" of a real web site to show how easy is it to make it more attractive, functional, and mobile-friendly.

Kevin Cully               Atlanta

Accessing and manipulating application data using Xojo

Xojo is a great tool for programmers who are used to developing in Visual Foxpro and Microsoft .NET. It allows application development, not just only Windows, but also Mac, Linux, Web, and iOS. This presentation will focus on the various techniques used in Xojo accesses to update data: SQL Pass Through, SQL Prepared Statements, and Object Relational Mapping.

For the last two years Kevin has a Senior Business Analyst and a DBA for the Cherokee County Government, deploying Xojo based solutions in a variety of county operational units. Kevin has two boys in college and a small farm where he lives with his wife and two dogs where they grow blueberries.

Mike Levy              Cincinnati

Given I have to test, when I do, then it should be cool

The goal of this quick talk is to build awareness around a set of testing tools, commonly used in the Behavior-Driven Development space (BDD) for codifying acceptance criteria, but are additionally useful for the entire testing triangle.

Ondrej Balas          Detroit

Open Source Game Development in the .NET Ecosystem

With so many frameworks to choose from, aspiring game developers are often overwhelmed with options. In this session we'll explore the decisions that go into choosing the right framework for your project. Next we'll look at one in particular: Duality. Duality is a flexible and open source framework for developing 2D games with .NET. I'll show you the fundamental patterns and principles behind game development and walk you through creating a simple game in Duality.

Ondrej Balas is the owner of UseTech Design, a Michigan-based development company that focuses primarily on .NET and other Microsoft technologies. Ondrej is also a Microsoft MVP in Visual Studio and Development Technologies, a writer for Visual Studio Magazine, and is very active in the Michigan software development community. Ondrej works across many industries including finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and logistics. Areas of expertise include similarity and matching across large data sets, algorithm design, distributed architecture, and software development practices.

Sam Nasr             Cleveland

Data Time Travel with Temporal Tables

SQL Server 2016 introduced Temporal Tables, allowing a developer to retrieve data from a specific point in time, without backups.  With a few TSQL commands a historical table can be created, automatically updated, and readily accessed.

Sam Nasr has been a software developer since 1995, focusing mostly on Microsoft technologies. Having achieved multiple certifications from Microsoft (MCSA, MCAD, MCTS, and MCT), Sam develops, teaches, and tours the country to present various topics in .Net. He’s involved with the Cleveland C#/VB.Net User Group, where he has been the group leader since 2003. In addition, he’s the leader of the .Net Study Group, an author for Visual Studio Magazine, and a Microsoft MVP since 2013.  When not coding, Sam loves spending time with his family and friends or volunteering at his local church.