For those of you in Southern California I'll be doing the Southern California FoxPro User Group Circuit next week (9th, 10th, 11th of August, 2005):
Integrating Electronic Payment Processing into Web apps
Tuesday: Los Angeles
This session will guide you through the maze of choices for collecting payments from your customers online. We'll start by discussing the business end and understanding of how gateway services, merchant providers interact and how you can get your payments processed over the Internet. You'll see the architecture and different approaches from several common providers including Authorize.NET, Verisign PayFlow, LinkPoint and AccessPoint as well as Paypal. Then we'll demonstrate and differentiate the various vendor APIs and provide a common framework of classes for managing multiple providers efficiently in your applications. Finally we'll put it all together in a demo application that demonstrates the credit card processing for multiple providers managed in both an Web Connection front end application and a Desktop application.
Introduction to RSS
I’ll also do a short, requested Jumpstart session on RSS usage both as a consumer and provider.
Porting a VFP Web Application to ASP.NET
Wednesday: Orange Country Fox
You've probably heard a lot about ASP.Net over the last year or so and you're wondering: Is .Net all that it's cracked up to be and is there a real benefit? This session is not to give you an answer to this question but to let you see what is involved in taking a VFP application and moving to .NET. This session describes the process taken to port a Visual FoxPro e-Commerce application to .NET. It describes some of the 'political' driving forces as well as the technical details and comparing how tasks are accomplished in VFP and .NET. The end result is a good comparison case that can showcase the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. The application described is a West Wind Web Store application including an Fat Client interface originally created with West Wind Web Connection and a set of business objects. The application was ported to .NET including a business object framework. The discussion touches on the migration process, application implementation, framework design, time to build and deploy, performance comparisons and other related issues.
10 Windows Tools you should know about
I’ll do a short Jumpstart session on some 10 must have Windows tools that should be fun.
The making of West Wind Html Help Builder
Thursday: San Diego
Help Builder is a rich and powerful Help and Documentation generation tool that was created using Visual FoxPro. Take a look behind the scenes at the technology that went into Help Builder to provide advanced functionality for a very rich desktop application. Find out how to utilize and integrate rich user interface controls that rely heavily on ActiveX control, how to use the Web Browser control effectively for displaying of content as well as editing HTML, see how to integrate Word into your applications both as an editor as well as an automation engine for generating output. We'll also talk about how Help Builder integrates with .NET by using Interop to access .NET functionality and by plugging into Visual Studio as an Add-in using .NET -> COM interop. This session provides a whirlwind tour of a host of advanced Visual FoxPro topics that are sure to spark ideas on what is possible with Visual FoxPro.
If you're in the Sou Cal area, stop by and say hello...