DISD 2008

DISD 2008 will be held at the Gold Dust West Internation Hotel in Carson City, Nevada.

Overview

You don’t want to miss DISD 2008! It will be the first chance you will have to see the next VDF development environment: Visual DataFlex 2008. As you can see by the agenda items below, web technologies are a major focus of this years’ DISD. With the explosion of Web based applications in the past year DISD is offering a number of sessions supporting Visual DataFlex development in this arena. Starting with our free Thursday training focused on Web enabling technologies including XML, XSLT, DTDs, SOAP, AJAX and more, we follow on Friday and Saturday with the following sessions. There will be a further announcement on the specifics of Thursday’s training within the next couple of weeks as the topic list solidifies. Please keep in mind that this list is preliminary and subject to change.

Guest Presenter

Our guest presenter for this year will be Gregg Shipler, MCT, MCSD, MCSE, MCDBA, MSF, MCITP: Database and Business Intelligence Developer, with 27 years in Data application development experience. He will be presenting topics, Everything XML: A broad based look at the world of XML from Documents to Streams to Taxonomies and Vocabularies, the advent of XML in our world today and insights into the future. Gregg is one of those gifted instructors that you will always learn something new and valuable from. He offers a broader industry perspective to many of the issues that we, as DataFlex developers, deal with every day.

Agenda

Specific sessions that have been scheduled so far are as follows:

Product Status – Stephen W. Meeley, Data Access Worldwide

This session will provide a recap of the current status of all Data Access Worldwide products. The goal is to quickly bring everyone up to date with Visual DataFlex and the products that surround it.

Visual DataFlex 2008 – John Tuohy, Data Access Worldwide

The session will introduce the latest version of Visual DataFlex. A primary focus of this release will be Windows Vista support and we will show you the changes we've made that will allow you to successfully and attractively move your applications to the Vista platform.. We will also show you how you can use skinning to make your applications look great. In addition, we will be showing you some important new features we've added to the Studio and to the framework.

Windows Vista, Visual DataFlex and your Applications– Stephen W. Meeley, Data Access Worldwide

One of our most important goals for Visual DataFlex 2008 is to provide support for Windows Vista. This is important as both a development tool, and as a deployment platform for your Visual DataFlex applications. In short, Visual DataFlex should work equally as well on Windows Vista as on other supported Windows platforms. Various changes in Windows Vista, such as User Account Control (UAC), require related changes in both how the development tool is used and in how applications are deployed and run. In this session we will examine the changes Vista brings, what has been done to Visual DataFlex to accommodate them and how to assess and prepare your applications for the Vista platform.

Using COM and the Codejock Menus – John Tuohy, Data Access Worldwide

The Codejock menus added to Visual DataFlex allows you to build a sophisticated and great looking menu, toolbar, status-bar system. All of this can be done without needing to use or understand the underlying COM interface. However, that COM interface is there and it can be used to handle all kinds of customizations. This presentation will show you how take advantage of this. This will cover some of the COM basics and explain how the Codejock COM classes are structured. With this knowledge we will then show examples of how to take full advantage of the Codejock features. These techniques can then be applied the Codejock menu system, the other Codejock controls and other COM controls.

From Vincent’s Laboratory – Vincent Oorsprong, Data Access Europe

Vincent will show a useful tool for VDF developers and some examples of exciting uses of the most current Visual DataFlex product. Want details? Come to DISD!

VDF Management Console & SOAP server GPS truck routing system - Oliver Nelson & Rod Mundy

This presentation will demonstrate real-time GPS technology interfaced with VDF Oliver and I will be presenting our GPS project. We'd like a late morning/early afternoon slot on Friday so we can show live trucks running. An hour to an hour and a half would work. The project involves downloading a route to a truck, showing the route and current location on a screen in the truck, sending real time truck locations back to a centralized server, and allowing messages to be sent from the truck to the server and vice versa. On the client side, we'll have a screen where we can view where the trucks are real time, and do planned/actual route overlays, and do exception reporting.

Achieving User Interface & Functional Distinction with VDF 12 and Codejock Components – Dan Levene

Anasazi Software, a leading developer of fully integrated enterprise software solutions for the Behavioral Healthcare industry, is targeting a May 2008 release of it’s new product, The Dr.’s HomePage. This product will provide doctors with a user interface experience that can be individually tailored to readily display the information the doctor most wants to see in the way he or she wants to see it. Members of Anasazi’s executive and development teams will discuss and demonstrate the unique user interface they have designed around several Codejock components, specifically, the Skin Framework, the Report Control, Docking Panes, Command Bars and the Popup control. In addition, they will discuss new technology functionality highlights including an innovative use of client and server web services to interface with a central database of drug information and interactions designed to aid doctors in generating safe, effective prescriptions. Interwoven in the discussion will be references to the product mission that has underpinned all design considerations—the business goal of providing a superior clinical tool that distinguishes itself in the marketplace based on its style, usability and reliability.

Running VDF in a virtualized hardware environment – Scott Myers

Virtualization is taking off. Scott Myers will be sharing his hard earned experience over the last year with this topic. Offering a “more nimble approach” to hardware infrastructure, virtualization has much to offer the organizations we work with. Scott’s presentation will focus on the functionality built into VMware and the hardware requirement for enabling the high availability functionality.

Interfacing VDF with MS Reporting Services – (To be decided)

This presentation offers a step by step walk through of the process of creating Microsoft Reporting Services (RSS) report and integrating into the VDF Order Entry example. There will be discussion of several interface options to RSS including SOAP, direct WEB access, and localized reporting.

Process logging using XML and E-Mail reporting with XSLT in VDF – Peter Miska

Using the Order Entry examples, this session would be a step by step generation of an XML order confirmation and an XSLT transform into an e-mail.

WebApp AJAX interface for business process showing real-time updates of server process – Dave Martinko

Based on Web based technologies, Dave has created an AJAX WebApp earlier this year and a Business Process for WebApp that shows real-time updates of server processing and allows remote cancelling of the process. It does the same thing for a WebApp that a BPO does for a windows app.

Flex on Flex; Getting SaaSy with SOAP – Oliver Nelson

Oliver will be showcasing a SaaS (Software as a Service) like application that uses a Visual DataFlex SOAP backend with an Adobe Flex or Mozilla XUL front end. This architecture allows for native or near-native application appearance and functionality on multiple operating systems without the need to do ANY porting. It also is inherently extensible via its SOAP backend. Although the application being shown isn't setup directly for SaaS operation, the model it’s based on is SaaS friendly.