As I am writing this, over 1,700 delegates are currently attending the 3 day Microsoft MVP Summit in Seattle Washington. MVP is a term meaning Most Valuable Professional, and it is an accolade conferred by Microsoft to some 3,000 people all over the world who have shown expertise in Microsoft technology, and agrees to spend some of their time to help users, write books and articles, and maintain user forums, and communities. The Philippines has currently 8 MVPs , and I myself have been a Microsoft MVP the past four years.
Today, everybody was excited as Bill Gates was the special keynote speaker. Bill Gates, who founded Microsoft in 1975, is dubbed a tech visionary, and for the last 10 years as well enjoyed the distinction of being the world’s richest man, and world’s most generous man, having donated over $30 billion of his wealth to philanthropy. After 32 years of leading Microsoft, Bill Gates have announced that he would retire in mid 2008 to put his efforts full time in managing his foundation, which for the last few years have been credited with making breakthroughs in saving thousands of lives in developing countries through its research and provision of vaccines for deadly diseases.
There are many exciting developments in the tech arena, but I would like to concentrate on two. First is that announcement that Microsoft will not be releasing any new version of Visual Foxpro, but will release this summer an SP2 patch which will be the last supported version of the product.
Visual Foxpro is a development tool that you don’t hear frequently nowadays, but during the 80s, it was the foremost programming language for developing business applications. In the 80s, one of the best three indispensable tools a user would have was a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a database management system. At that time, the leading database was Dbase II, which later became Dbase III. It was so popular that there were several other tools that tried to emulate it, among others Clipper and Foxbase. These development tools were collectively called xBase languages. Foxbase later became Foxpro, and in the early 90s, it was bought by Microsoft, and became Visual Foxpro. For the last 10 years however, Foxpro has been declining in popularity, as new development platforms using Visual Basic, Java, and C++ became more prevalent especially in the development of web based applications.
The users were hard core loyal, however, to visual foxpro, and it went from visual foxpro 3.0 to the current version of 9.0 as the existing users continue to use it. The news was received not so happily by many loyalists, but the good news is that Microsoft will continue to support the product until the year 2015.
The other tool I would like to introduce was something that has been around for sometime but may not be known to many of you. It is free ( available for download but it will purportedly check first if the user is a genuine license user before installing itself in a promo called Genuine Windows Advantage) , and it is especially useful for those who open internet café or manage the IT laboratory of a school.
The tool is called the Shared Computer Toolkit for windows XP. There are a couple of things that it does, but the most obvious is that it will protect your hard disk from permanent changes. For instance, in an internet café or school, a computer is used by many people. These people make configuration and profile changes, they download files, they install and add additional programs, and sometimes, the mischievous of them delete files, or change the settings. When you have the shared toolkit, all you have to do is reboot the software, and the computer and hard disk will be returned to its exact condition — deleted files restored, and the whole hard disk restored to its original state. This therefore makes it very easy for schools and cafes to setup, manage and protect their computers without eating up a lot of resources.
But during the discussion, it was revealed that some companies are actually using it. Many have test environments that can easily restore its original state if the tests do not work. Some people purportedly use it in their house to prevent their kids from changing any configurations.
This program is now going to its second version, for which it will change its name to Windows SteadyState. However, for now, if you want to take a look at it, try checking and downloading it from www.microsoft.com/sharedaccess
Wilson Ng keeps a log of his articles in www.ngkhai.net/bizdrivenlife