DevCon 2013 is coming back to California. YAY! It will be August 12th – 15th in San Diego, California. For more information, visit the conference web page. DevCon is always a blast. Lots of great tricks, tips, and techniques from the best FileMaker heads from all over the world. I’ll be giving two talks this year, on the first and last day. I hope to see you there. It’s definitely worth the trip.
Here are my session abstracts
Writing Modular and Reusable Code
2:00 PM – Tuesday -8/13/2013
Code reuse is a central tenant to application design. We need methodologies that allow us to share our code within our solutions and amongst our fellow developers. We need to spend less time rewriting or copying and pasting code, and more time building new features for our solutions. We’ll pick up where last year’s “Reusable” session left off. We’ll take a look at some new examples of how to make our code smart enough to figure out what it needs to do, and how to give other developers clear and easy ways to reuse your code. Finally, we will propose some simple conventions to organise FileMaker code into identifiable modules.
What You Will Learn
- How to design a reusable, portable module or feature
- How to organize your code into logical units
- How to use the latest features of FileMaker to make your code simpler to use
- How to make your code smart enough to figure out on it’s own what it is supposed to do
Understanding Data Binding: What it Does and When and How to Safely Break it!
3:45pm – Thursday – 8/15/2013
The data binding of FileMaker Layouts to data tables solves several common database problems and is a significant part of what makes FileMaker based solutions faster to build. But, because it also imposes some restrictions on development and maintenance of complex solutions, developers naturally look for ways to break free of this tight coupling. But before we go about breaking it, we need to understand what it does for us and how it works. We are going to delve into data binding and what it does behind the scenes to keep our data safe. We’ll learn how to use it to handle some complex database problems, and finally we’ll learn some techniques that can help us break free of that binding when we must.
What You Will Learn
- Why is FileMaker data binding such a big advantage
- When does data binding occur, and when does it not occur
- When and how to safely break data binding
- How to correctly handle binding problems such as record locking