In MSFT's view, the Advisor DevCon is the one "official" VFP developers

conference. As such, attendees get the "official" MSFT message on

development, education, community and other topics in the VFP world. By

virtue of sponsoring the event (and owning the product) Microsoft gives

the keynote at this conference. The opening keynote is a summarization

of items that they feel are important to the VFP community and get you

jazzed about the conference.

Before I get into the keynote done by Ken Levy and Yair Alan Griver

(YAG), let me provide some background information. I do the scheduling

for the Los Angeles VFP Developers User Group. Ken Levy used to live in

Southern California and has been a speaker for many years at LA Fox.

It's been a tradition for him to speak in December at our group.

Sometimes he has made it twice in a year. On at least one occasion he's

taken personal time off to make the group. He enjoys it, we enjoy it,

it's win/win for everybody involved.

Obviously for the last couple of years, he's had the title of Visual

FoxPro Product Manager. When he comes to speak at our group, it gives

him the opportunity to try out his presentation in a safe and friendly

environment. Needless to say, that message has included a fair amount of

.NET baggage.

I'll quote some of our LA Fox board members -- (About Ken's visits)

"We're so lucky and honored to have Ken speak at our user group. We love

it! We just have a great time when he's here." (Anybody talking about

NET at the UG) -- "I'm so sick and tired about hearing about .NET. I

just don't want to hear it anymore." Now if the choice is no .NET or no

Ken, we'll take Ken in a heartbeat. That's not the point. The point here

is that LA Fox has heard more of their fair share of .NET hype.

There was a posting here on Profox a few days ago about an opening for

15 VFP positions in Southern California. I don't know how much Ken

played a part in the creation of these positions, but I can tell you for

a fact that on at least two occasions, he has personally visited their

IT department to discuss VFP's future with them. I know that because I

drove him there <g>. At least, that must have been reassuring to them.

Would Robert Green or Jon Sigler care enough about VFP to do such a

thing? Highly doubtful... All of SoCal and the headhunter that posted

the message owe Ken a giant thank you...

Now back to the keynote...

I've mentioned before about some of the details of the keynote. The

keynote was about 75 minutes long. It was shaped to be what the TV

advertising world calls a "donut". Given a television commercial break,

have a commercial for product "A", then a commercial for Product "B",

followed by a repeat or different commercial for product "A". This

provides extra highlights for product "A". At this keynote there was 10

minutes VFP (Ken), 50 minutes of .NET (mostly, but not entirely, YAG)

and 15 minutes of more VFP (Ken). However, this wasn't done to highlight

Visual FoxPro -- Visual FoxPro was the hook to get you to listen to the

NET message. In this case, product "B" was being highlighted. This was

going to be YAG's keynote.

YAG gave a professional presentation on .NET. All the demos worked. You

name it, he mentioned it. VB.NET. ADO.NET. C#. J#. The Compact

Framework. .NET working on devices. ASP.NET. Windows 2003 Server. SQL

Server. I'm sure BizTalk Server and everything else got thrown in there

as well. Web Services. Longhorn. Whidbey. XML. Communicating with

handheld devices.

And it put the audience to sleep.

In MSFT's zeal to convert you to a .NET zombie, YAG succeeded in the

second part. The audience became a bunch of zombies.

The opening keynote is designed to get the attendees excited about

attending DevCon. It didn't happen. The audience only applauded twice

during the keynote. The first time was in the beginning -- "Welcome to

the 2003 Advisor Developers Conference!" and the second time was the end

of the keynote -- "Enjoy the conference!".

The problem was simply obvious -- people paid thousands of dollars to

hear and learn about product "A". It didn't really happen during the

keynote.

In my opinion, this was the second worst DevCon keynote ever. As noted

earlier, the Paul Gross keynote was worse. If people remember the 1995

closing keynote with the old guard MSFTie from DEC that rambled on (he

retired soon thereafter), never mentioning FoxPro, leaving the audience

thinking "What was that about?" -- that was the closest thing to Alan's

keynote.

For a review of last year's Advisor keynote see

http://leafe.com/archives/showMsg/77642.

Somewhere in the keynote we learned that we can see a sneak preview of

the next version of Visual Foxpro (Europa) at the bonus session that

evening.

As mentioned previously, I left the bonus session before it got started

because the opening slides indicated it was starting with another .NET

presentation. I found out later on that during this presentation someone

in the audience shouted "Get to Europa!!!" (I'm curious how soon this

occured in the presentation. 5 minutes? 30 minutes? Did the audience

applaud?) Supposedly, Ken got really flustered, flew through the .NET

slides faster than they could be read and got to VFP. Again, I wasn't

there so please correct or clarify where appropriate. I came back to see

the end of the Europa presentation.

While the sessions are of high quality, there's not enough VFP sessions.

Again, too much .NET hype.

DevCon tidbits...

At least one trade show company the purports to be big in .NET

development ** has no .NET consulting work whatsoever **. (In fact, if

you define "work" for the moment as doing .NET application development,

not getting paid for writing .NET articles, or .NET training, or writing

.NET books, or selling .NET products, or getting INETA to pay for you to

speak at .NET User Groups, or speaking at conferences, at least 2 out

the 4 recent VFP -> C# MVPs right now are doing no .NET work at all.)

That's .NET in the real world <g>.

The Mind's Eye booth with Rich Simpson's report writer seemed to be

doing pretty well.

Two people came up to me to ask how can one buy VFP 8. FoxToolBox.Com

had a booth and they were selling VFP 8. They didn't bring nearly enough

boxes of the product.

YAG is aware of the .NET/VFP/FoxPro count being done during the opening

keynote.

One distressing note: Flat out lying coming from MSFT. Not stretching

the truth, simply lying. This is just one example: On at least six

separate occasions, some well before, some during the conference,

MSFTies stating that "Advisor has the same amount of attendees as last

year" or "Advisor has 500 attendees" or both. As others have noted, the

conference hotel didn't even hold 500 people. People come up to me to

state that (MSFT) "They're lying". Personally, 375 seems too high.

Jokingly, I consistently state "MSFT is correct. I really do think there

are 500 attendees here. It's just that 180 of them are dressed as empty

seats." (I think I'd better keep my day job <s>)

A MSFTie admitted that the .NET sessions had poor attendance.

SET SPECULATION ON

Like I've said in another message, Ken seemed edgy to me. Now I don't

know this (Ken wouldn't tell me, he's a team player but then again, I

wouldn't ask), but I suspect that Ken felt the keynote message wouldn't

go over very well, he argued his point, and lost. He was proven correct

but now he was left for the rest of DevCon to clean up the mess.

Ken knows what would work and what wouldn't work with the VFP crowd. All

the polish in the world can't hide the fact that YAG has lost touch with

the VFP community. YAG may have won the internal turf battle, but lost

the war.

SET SPECULATION OFF

If I get the time, I'll go over specific problems with the keynote along

with some suggested solutions, and well as other DevCon stuff.

Bill Anderson