San Francisco Day 5: The End

Today was the final day of FileMaker DevCon 2009. I had a great time on this trip. Made some new friends, and connected with some old ones. This was my second DevCon, and I hope I get to do more. I learned so much, and as I digest the files that they gave us, I’m certain I will continue to learn for a long time to come.

The first session for me today was “Practical Script Triggers” by Geoff Coffey (Six Fried Rice)

Session Description (from the DevCon site)

Script Triggers are the most significant advancement in FileMaker Pro 10, one of FileMaker’s biggest power-ups in years. At the same time, these automatic actions can b and e fraught with pitfalls your first time out. In this session, you’ll learn how script triggers can help you build better databases with less code, and avoid the traps along the way.

This was a great session. All through DevCon I heard about Geoff Coffey. Now, I know why. This guy is brilliant. His presentation was both entertaining, and very informative. Geoff really stressed how important it is to familiarize yourself with script object behavior. You DevCon people who couldn’t attend his session will certainly want to get his files off of the CD. They are awesome examples of the things that you can do with script triggers. Some of which were even demonstrated at the Keynote. There are examples of global search, automatic sorting, highlighting an active record in list view, cancel guard, restore tab state, really cool Excel-like keyboard navigation for table view, and more.

I loved this session, and I’m really looking forward to trying his techniques.

Then I attended “Extending Solution Functionality” by Ray Cologon (NightWing Enterprises)

Session Description (from the DevCon site)

FileMaker Pro 10 provides significant features and product enhancements that open up some exciting new opportunities for developers. In this session, you will be taken on a tour of some of the highlights of the latest release, with pointers to some of the ways the new features can help you to get the most out of your solutions. The session will include demonstrations of a number of techniques that show the power of the expanded feature set. You will get to see code and coding techniques that unlock hidden powers in this new release.

This was another great session. Ray is the author of the FileMaker Pro 10 Bible. He showed some great samples for taking advantage of features added in FileMaker Pro 10. He also showed that all of these scripts are portable. Very cool stuff.

Over all, I was very happy with this DevCon. I enjoyed the first one that I went to last year, but I think I got more out of this one. That is because I have a better understanding of FileMaker Pro than I had at last year’s DevCon. This year, I actually understood much of what I saw. The presenters just made it so much more clear, and showed me some great new things.

Now, I need to get back home and see how much of this stuff I can put in my own FileMaker Pro solutions.