Doug Hennig is a partner with Stonefield Systems Group Inc. and Stonefield Software Inc. He is the author of the award-winning Stonefield Database Toolkit (SDT); the award-winning Stonefield Query; the MemberData Editor, Anchor Editor, and CursorAdapter and DataEnvironment builders that come with Microsoft Visual FoxPro; and the My namespace and updated Upsizing Wizard in Sedna, an extension for Visual FoxPro released by Microsoft.

Doug is co-author of the “What’s New in Visual FoxPro” series (the latest being “What’s New in Nine”) and “The Hacker’s Guide to Visual FoxPro 7.0.” He was the technical editor of “The Hacker’s Guide to Visual FoxPro 6.0” and “The Fundamentals.” All of these books are from Hentzenwerke Publishing. Doug wrote over 100 articles in 10 years for FoxTalk and has written numerous articles in FoxPro Advisor and Advisor Guide. He currently writes a column for FoxRockX magazine.

Doug spoke at every Microsoft FoxPro Developers Conference (DevCon) since 1997 and at user groups and developer conferences all over the world. He is one of the organizers of the annual Southwest Fox conference. He is one of the administrators for the VFPX VFP community extensions Web site on CodePlex.

Doug has been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 1996. Doug was awarded the 2006 FoxPro Community Lifetime Achievement Award.

1. What does being an MVP mean to you?

It’s a great honor being named an MVP. I truly appreciate Microsoft’s recognition of the support I’ve given the Microsoft Visual FoxPro (VFP) community over the years. And the perks are great!

2. If you could ask Steve Ballmer one question about Microsoft, what would it be?

Do you still wear the Canadian hockey jersey you got at the 2008 MVP Summit?

3. What do you think the best software ever written was?

VFP, of course. For me, it’s a software construction kit: I can literally write any software I can imagine using it.

4. If you were the manager of VFP (assuming it was still in production), what would you change?

I would make it into a .NET language. This would extend the life of VFP and bring new capabilities to the language, but also bring the benefits of VFP to the .NET world.

5. What are the best features/improvements of VFP?

The best feature of VFP not found in other languages is the built-in data manipulation commands and functions. This feature makes it easy to do things in VFP other languages can’t do at all or can only do with a lot of complex code.

6. What was the last book you read?

AC/DC: Maximum Rock & Roll by Murray Engleheart and Arnaud Durieux. I love rock biographies, including the ones I’ve read on Randy Bachman, The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Meatloaf, KISS, and Fleetwood Mac.

7. What music CD do you recommend?

The greatest rock CD of all time: Back in Black by AC/DC.

8. What makes you a great MVP?

My willingness to share my discoveries, techniques, and code with community members.

9. What is in your computer bag?

USB external drive, USB memory stick, MVP lanyard (I usually replace the lanyard at other conferences with it), extra laptop battery, and travel supplies (European power adapter, gum, earphones, etc.)

10. What is the best thing that has happened since you have become an MVP?

Not computer related: the birth of my son Nick in 1997.

11. What is your motto?

“There are no problems, only opportunities.” (“It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission” is a close second.)

12. Who is your hero?

My friend Mike White, who died in 2005. He set the bar for me in being a father, husband, and friend.

13. What does success mean to you?

Having the recognitionof my accomplishments and the means to provide a nice lifestyle for my family.

Team RoboTree (Short Film)

The team is well on it's way to create a new short film for the competition. The students were thrown a curveball as the theme and the guidelines for the finals are the same for the second round. Essentially, the goal is to "share a perspective on how technology enables a sustainable environment". The team worked into the wee hours of the morning, took a break and then kick started this morning. Media, Drake and Ryan have been travelling all over the city by rented bicycle and using the Métro. The deadline for the film is 2:00 AM tomorrow morning, then a presentation at the Digital Theatre on Monday.

Team GreeNet (Interface Design)

Jin and Kevin are furiously working on their interface. As I type this, it's the final hour of the competition for them - then well deserved sleep as they have been awake working for the past 24hrs. The goal for the finals is to innovate and envision revolutionary interfaces for a mobile devices, a Web application and Web portal based on the theme "Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment". After today, the team gets to relax a bit and wait for the judging results.

You can view more photos here. Best of luck to both Robotree and GreeNet. Go Canada!

I'm sure many of you have seen Microsoft's Patterns & Practices website and I'll bet a large number of you have read the best practices guidance there and used the application blocks available there.

Well, a new guidance stream is available on the site, this one specific to providing prescriptive guidance on WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) applications.  It was formerly code-named Prism, but is now available publicly as the Composite Application Guidance for WPF.

The Composite Application Guidance for WPF is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client applications. This guidance will help you design and build flexible composite WPF client applications—composite applications use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together in the overall application.

Using the guidance streamlines the WPF team development experience. You can build solutions that take advantage of the full power of WPF and that are highly maintainable, testable, and whose pieces can be developed by separate teams.

The code for the application block itself is available as open source from CodePlex and can be found here.

So, what's "in the box", so to speak?  Well, lots of stuff.  Below is a list of the things available as part of this Patterns & Practices release:

• Stock Trader Reference Implementation
• Composite Application Library for WPF
• Quickstarts (4)
• Hands on Lab (1)
• Documentation (300 pages)
• Composite Baseline Architecture
• UI Designer Guidance
• Design Concepts (3)
• Technical Concepts (8)
• Patterns (6) + Patterns Overview
• How-to’s (20)

From a perspective of which challenges it addresses for WPF development, this release is meant to provide the following jumpstart functionality:

• Modularity: The Composite Application Library promotes modularity by allowing you to implement business logic, visual components, infrastructure components, presenter or controller components, and any other objects the application requires, in separate modules. Developers can easily create the UI and implement business logic independently of each other.
• User Interface Composition: The Composite Application Library promotes user interface composition by allowing you to implement visual components from various loosely coupled visual components, known as views, which may reside in separate modules. The visual components may display content from multiple back-end systems. To the user, it appears as one seamless application.

Team Robotree includes Dan Tran (left), Media Ridha (bottom centre) taken just before Drake Birmann (top centre), and Ryan Morrison (right) left for tree planting in Northern Ontario for the summer. The students are from Fanshawe College and the University of Western Ontario. They are one of the six worldwide finalist in the Imagine Cup Short Film competition for their work called "Terra":

Terra is a fairytale about an earth-child who dwells in the forest, and has the ability to sense the environmental impact of human actions on the natural world. Upon discovering garbage from the city in her peaceful forest, Terra decides to help humanity make informed decisions to improve the everyday uptake of the earth’s energy and resources by inventing a device to determine humans’ ecological impact. Terra brings the very first ecological calculator, the “Eco-Cal,” to the city. The Eco-Cal can calculate the ecological footprint of every human being and interpret it through a display screen that shows the unseen destruction of our actions. At first, people rebuke Terra and are unwilling to listen to what she has to offer them. Then a young boy who believes in Terra’s message elps her and takes her to a willing family. The story ends by placing the fate of the natural world not simply on the imaginative technology of the Eco-cal, but on the choices of each individual to sustain the environment in the hopes of a greener future. You can view several captures of the film on my photo website and read an interview on the team's website.

Click below to view "Terra" via Channel 8:

Imagine Cup 2008 Round 3 Film: Terra