Conferences

Page last updated
Friday, December 25, 2009

Begining in 2002, A-Shell developer conferences have been held every two years. See below for information about the conferences, and see our photo collection for the rest of the story.
  

2008

Our 2008 conference was in Savannah, Georgia, November 13,14, 15, and it was quite outstanding. The hotel was very nice and in a great part of town, the conference room was on the top floor and had a 270 degree view of the city, many excellent restaurants and interesting spots were within easy walking distance--and the A-Shell part was pretty good too. Here is info on the place we stayed, which is highly recommended if you're traveling to Savannah.

2006

The 2006 International A-Shell Developers' and Resellers' Conference was held in New Orleans November 9, 10 and 11. The seminars were conducted in a conference room at the Royal Saint Charles hotel , and most of the guests stayed at that establishment. The hotel is in an excellent location between downtown and the French Quarter, about eight blocks from the River. Besides three rather intense days of A-Shell technical discussions, highlights of the event included a dinner cruise up and down the River on a paddlewheel steamer, and lots of good food and drink on Bourbon Street and its immediate neighborhood.

 

2004

The 2004 A-Shell Developer and Reseller Conference was held October 27 - 29 in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Most of the major A-Shell resellers and developers attended, and we had a very productive couple days of A-Shell seminars. The A-Shell User Interface (AUI), A-Shell's system for managing and implementing a graphical user interface in BASIC programs running under A-Shell, was the major topic of conversation. Several developers who have begun "GUI-ifying" their applications gave presentations showing their accomplishments to date.

The weather was great, the company was interesting, as always, and we found time to have some fun as well as getting a lot accomplished. Thanks to all who came.

Pre-Conference info being saved for posterity:

Reservations:
Our discounted rates on hotel rooms ($129 standard, $149 ocean view) are available only until September 28. Make your reservations before then or expect to pay an additional $20-50 per night. See "Motel Details" below.

Conference Basics:
 When: Oct 27, 28, 29, 2004
Where: Embassy Suites, Deerfield Beach, FL

Program:
Wed, Oct 27: Drinks and welcome session, 7:30 - 9:00 p.m.  
Thurs, Oct 28: Conference, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Fri, Oct 29: Conference, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Airport Info:
The hotel is between two airports: 19 miles (30km) north of Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport (FLL), and 36 miles (58km) south of: Palm Beach Intl Airport (PBI). Miami International Airport is approximately 43 miles (69km) from the hotel.

Ft Lauderdale airport (FLL) is recommended. To get a taxi ($50) or van shuttle ($12) at FLL, go to the Ground Transporation booth and tell them that you're going to the Embassy Suites in Deerfield Beach. Be sure to specify Deerfield Beach (address below); there is also an Embassy Suites in Ft Lauderdale, and you don't want to go to that one.

Hotel Details:
Make reservations under the name "MicroSabio" in order to get our rates of: $129 regular room, $149 ocean view room. These rates are good only until Sep 28, then they revert to normal rates (which are somewhat higher) All rooms are suites. Room price includes full breakfast and happy hour drinks. Specify king bed or two queens

    Embassy Suites Hotel
    950 Ocean Drive (A1A)
    Deerfield Beach FL 33441
    Phone (US Toll-Free): 1-800-EMBASSY
    Phone (Local & international): 954-426-0478
    Fax: 954-360-0539
    suites@embassyflorida.com
    http://www.embassyflorida.com/

 

2002

The First Annual (definitely the first and we hope the annual) A-Shell Developers' and Resellers' Conference was held at the Huntley Radisson Hotel in Santa Monica (Los Angeles area), in mid-September 2002. It provided two full days of good food, good company, interesting discussions and lots of information about A-Shell. 

The conference was a mixture of tutorials, demos, and discussions about a variety of topics of interest to A-Shell developers and resellers.  Some of the most interesting discussions were those that took place "off the agenda" during meals, breaks, drinks, etc., for which one simply had to be present in order to appreciate. 

Below are some synopsi (how often do you get to see that word?) of presentations from the seminar:

  • Easysoft ODBC driver for ISAMPLUS and flat files.  John Kos came all the way from England to demo and discuss this excellent add-on product which allows you to define "views" of your data which can then be accessed by developers or end-users in the context of standard desktop tools like SQL Query, Excel, Access, Crystal Reports.  Other uses include interfacing standard web development tools to your database.  They also have an XML layer that would allow existing applications to serve up XML documents on the web with minimal effort.   Their driver understands our data types and the ISAMPLUS key and data structures, although for simple queries, it will also work well with any contiguous file with fixed length records.  It's expensive on a per-seat basis but it's a simultaneous use license so a single license may work for even large sites provided there is only one simultaneous user.   Review/post comments/questions for other A-Shell developers to the Easysoft ODBC topic on our BBS.   Contact us for pricing/discounting details.  There is also an active topic devoted to matters relating to converting to ISAMPLUS .
     
  • ESP – Alan Christensen, James Jarboe IV and Ken Carlson gave a tantalizing demo of what they have accomplished with ESP, including an optional Visual Basic front-end (thus providing the option of pure GUI or pure text on a workstation-by-workstation basis.)   Alan is currently using this technology with Softworks Basic, but James has it "95%" implemented under A-Shell/Windows as well.  Several (but not all) developers seem to agree that they would like this capability, but the main question is how much work is required in restructuring existing programs.  We discussed possibilities for simplifying that by creating "wrappers" that link INFLD calls to ESP screens.  It remains to be determined whether there is sufficient interest to pursue this further.  If you have any interest, comments, questions regarding it, please post them to the ESP topic on our BBS. 
     
  • Simpler, piecemeal enhancements to the user interface that can be added to existing programs to make them more "Windows-like" (especially but not exclusively under A-Shell/Windows) – We saw several demos in this area.  Jack showed several enhancements (advanced color use, beveling, mousing, windows menus, imaging) that were added to a 1980's-era AlphaACCOUNTING-style application.   Jorge Tavares demonstrated a few of his programming tricks, including a sophisticated, user-maintainable, mouse-able menu system, an image catalog, a GUI-version of DIR (reminiscent of "OS/Exec"), previewing of GDI printouts.  Herman Roehm's demo proved that "LA" (lower Alabama) pharmacists were more sophisticated than we might have suspected, with clever substring searching and a variety of tricks to minimize the number of data entry keystrokes.  Tom Heim demo'd his "poor man's SQL" search/select technique (based on MATCH.SBR), pick lists, output to Excel.  All of these people are willing to answer questions, provide code samples, share utilities, etc. if asked nicely on the BBS (open up a topic under the Program Development Forum.)
     
  • Improving Data Access Performance – where the bottlenecks are, how bad they are, ways to work around them.  Discussion of Windows Terminal Server, ATS, locking techniques, memory mapping, use of the new ASFLAG options for creating local copies of read-only files, etc.  (There are a number of topics already on the BBS relating to these issues – please post your comments to an existing one or open a new one if appropriate.)