Skip to main content

Need to Diagram your FoxPro programs?

I just got a news release from a company in Finland touting the latest version of Visustin, a flowcharting program that reported to work with Visual FoxPro, among other languages. I was definitely curious and for good reason - one thing I always used to love about FoxDoc, that old venerable project documenting tool, was its flow diagram. (granted it was in ASCII but it was still useful)

Here's a screen shot of Visustin with a sample VFP program:


It's very cool and I can definitely see where it would be useful in figuring out new pieces or "inherited" pieces of code. The fact that it also helps diagram VB, C#, Java, T-SQL and other code as well, definitely should make it invaluable to anyone.

You can open a program or simply cut and paste code in the screen and hit Diagram and away it goes.

It even lets you export out to Visio, Word and Powerpoint - great for code reviews! A bulk flowchart program (disabled in the demo) looks like it would let you chart out a set of files and create images based on the charts.

In my few tests, it looked like it supported the standard VFP constructs including newer ones such as TRY...CATCH, etc.

But then there are the things that caught me up:

1. While it was able to scope out a 2800 line program, it took several minutes to do so. If you were working

2. I wish it had support for other VFP components such as VCX and SCX files or perhaps more importantly, project and menu files.

3. I wish it had an open API so I could write an Addin for it - that said, it does have a command line syntax so you could do one if you needed to.

There's a free demo that you can try. It's limited but does give you a good idea on how to use it.

Press release: Visustin v4 Automates Flowcharting and UML Diagramming


Add to my del.icio.us

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Elevating Project Specifications with Three Insightful ChatGPT Prompts

For developers and testers, ChatGPT, the freely accessible tool from OpenAI, is game-changing. If you want to learn a new programming language, ask for samples or have it convert your existing code. This can be done in Visual Studio Code (using GitHub CoPilot) or directly in the ChatGPT app or web site.  If you’re a tester, ChatGPT can write a test spec or actual test code (if you use Jest or Cypress) based on existing code, copied and pasted into the input area. But ChatGPT can be of huge value for analysts (whether system or business) who need to validate their needs. There’s often a disconnect between developers and analysts. Analysts complain that developers don’t build what they asked for or ask too many questions. Developers complain that analysts haven’t thought of obvious things. In these situations, ChatGPT can be a great intermediary. At its worst, it forces you to think about and then discount obvious issues. At best, it clarifies the needs into documented requirements. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Respect

Respect is something humans give to each other through personal connection. It’s the bond that forms when we recognize something—or someone—as significant, relatable, or worthy of care. This connection doesn’t have to be limited to people. There was an  article  recently that described the differing attitudes towards AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini (formerly Bard). Some people treat them like a standard search while others form a sort of personal relationship — being courteous, saying “please” and “thank you”. Occasionally, people share extra details unrelated to their question, like, ‘I’m going to a wedding. What flower goes well with a tuxedo?’ Does an AI “care” how you respond to it? Of course not — it reflects the patterns it’s trained on. Yet our interaction shapes how these tools evolve, and that influence is something we should take seriously. Most of us have all expressed frustration when an AI “hallucinates”. Real or not, the larger issue is that we have hi...
Post a Comment
Read more

When A Machine Starts To Care

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke (1962)  I first used that quote when I was starting out in the tech industry. Back then, it was a way to illustrate just how fast and powerful computers had become. Querying large datasets in seconds felt magical—at least to those who didn’t build them.  Today, we’re facing something even more extraordinary. Large Language Models (LLMs) can now carry on conversations that approach human-level fluency. Clarke’s quote applies again. And just as importantly, many researchers argue that LLMs meet—or at least brush up against—the criteria of the Turing Test.  We tend to criticize LLMs for their “hallucinations,” their sometimes-confident inaccuracies. But let’s be honest: we also complain when our friends misremember facts or recount things inaccurately. This doesn’t excuse LLMs—it simply highlights that the behavior isn’t entirely alien. In some ways, it mirrors our own cognitive limits....
Post a Comment
Read more