There are sessions where you can play along with the speaker, and then there are sessions where you just have to sit back and enjoy the ride, knowing you’ll have to read the whitepaper on the plane in order to comprehend it all. Christof’s session on using .NET in VFP apps is definitely the latter. Like watching a Shakespearean play where you need to simultaneously translate the accent and parse the syntax before you realize the brilliance, it was all my rum-fogged mind could do to keep up with Christof. And then, just as I would grasp a concept and think of a half-way decent use for it, I realized Christof was demonstrating that very idea.
For example, Christof showed how to use .NET’s XmlTextReader to parse a 175 MB XML file in under 5s. Then he wowed the crowed by creating true multi-threaded applications in VFP (he even showed the ThreadCount in System Processes to prove it), and gave some practical advice for places to use this multi-threading to provide users with smoother experiences by, for example, validating fields in the background while letting the end-user continue to enter data. He also showed an example of interfacing w/ a bar code scanner that only had a .NET interface.
I can’t pretend to have comprehended all of this. I’m sure his whitepaper is fantastic and I’ll need to spend some time with it.
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