I was bit by a 2.6 year old Fox(Pro)

Talk about old ghosts coming back to haunt you.

I was upgrading a customer's old Foxfire! installation from version 3.0 to 8.0. They were running Foxfire! 3.0 under FoxPro 2.6/Windows.

But they had this one report that kept on crashing under the 8.0 version that would run fine under their old version.

I tried to run Foxfire! 3.0 under a copy of Visual FoxPro and it crashed there as well.

Hmmm...what could it be? I looked at the SQL generated.

There was the problem that was causing the crash: one of the relationships was referring to a field that didn't even exist.

The field in the SQL referred to a field named PART_SEC_ID_I but the real field was called PART_SEC_I.

But why didn't it crash under the older version?

The reason? FoxPro 2.6 ignored the extra fields.

I opened up the table in FoxPro 2.6.

? part_sec_i
** returned a value
? part_sec_id_i
** returned the same value.

Sheesh...I can't believe we were actually able to build quality applications back then but then again, when our tool wouldn't even tell us we were wrong in our field names - who needed field validation?

Now the fun part - how to tell someone that even though their old application worked great, it was actually not reporting a problem it should have been.

Comments

Blogs and RSS come to Microsoft.com

MS has just introduced their portal and it's pretty comprehensive. Nothing quite like learning that some people use AIM instead of MSN messenger, or that there really may be a need for supporting 4 monitors ( Cyrus Complains ) However, it's really a great sign that MS is serious about supporting the blogging community which seems to have um, exploded in size in the past year. Blogs and RSS come to Microsoft.com

FoxInCloud Stats

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Facebook Revolt - imeem alternatives?

When Scoble noted how Facebook under major revolt , I immediately thought of a site I found yesterday. The value offered by Facebook's feeds however do seem very cool - if only they had been smart and made them opt-in, instead of opt-out. I have been impressed though with Facebook's opening of their API's - they certainly get it that they need to open it up to developers. I haven't really explored this other site, beyond my first look. In some ways, I think the whole social networking site thing is just silly , but this site (imeem) definitely showed some value. I could find music (as posted by the artist), it worked in Firefox and it allowed people to rank, add to delicious and more. And when I'm looking at someone, I can see what they're up to (or rather what they allow us to see). Anyways, you may want to check it out.

Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

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