Southwest Xbase++ 2017: Cancelled :(

[swxbase]

Dear Xbase++ Communities,

Geek Gatherings LLC, the organizers of Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++, have partnered with Alaska Software and the best speakers from the Xbase++ community to run Southwest Xbase++ for the past five years. Last November, Alaska Software informed us their core staff members would not be presenting at conferences in 2017, in order to focus on their other commitments including the LEAP program, which tests Visual FoxPro source code projects in Xbase++.

After hearing the news, we initially thought we would put the Xbase++ conference on hiatus for a single year as Alaska expects to have speakers available again in 2018. But after talking with others in the Xbase++ Community (including Alaska), we decided to try to run the conference without speakers from Alaska. We issued the Call for Speakers for both conferences. Unfortunately, we did not receive enough session proposals to put together an Xbase++ conference this year. We are naturally disappointed, but Alaska will continue to sponsor Southwest Fox and we are sure Southwest Fox will be a terrific conference on its own as it was for eight years before we incorporated the Xbase++ conference. In 2018, we hope to return to our usual dual conference format.

We look forward to announcing the session topics and speakers and to getting registration rolling for 2017 very soon. Thank you for your continued support of Southwest Fox.

Only 199 days until we gather in Gilbert.

Regards,
Tamar Granor, Rick Schummer, and Doug Hennig

Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ Organizers
Geek Gatherings, LLC

[skiman]

No speakers, no users, no Xbase++???

[TWolfe]

Sounds like 'the LEAP program' took Alaska over the cliff. Even a great product can not survive without a committed and growing user base. Alaska must not understand how important momentum is in the marketplace. You can not just take a year off and expect your customer base to grow, or even wait for you.

Terry

[bwolfsohn]

Not surprising.... 90% of the sessions were FOX oriented, and i think the main reason for having us there was to be able to get up to the minimum numbers they needed to run the show...

I think they were much more into how to extend their current software than how to switch over...

[rdonnay]

Even a great product can not survive without a committed and growing user base.

I think that Alaska has been over-emphasizing PostGres and VFP conversions and under-emphasing CXP.

There really are some nice features in Xbase++ 2.0 that are useful to the existing community.
Unfortunately, they haven't documented those features so I have to discover them.

CXP is working great for me and can be used by the existing Xbase++ community.
I find more and more uses for it and so do my customers.

I'm actually pleased that they are sitting it out for awhile. Maybe they can use this time to finish some stuff, especially documentation.

Even Apple had to do that one year.
They missed Comdex back in the 90's.