Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

We had a problem with an install today for a SQL application and SQL Express. The database was created properly and we set up Express to accept remote connections, but for some reason, none of the client machines would connect to it. The error we were getting was ConnectionOpen (gethostbyname()). It was frustrating to say the least - we tried switching between TCP/IP and Named Pipes and a variety of things - all to no avail - until I came across this post: SQL Server Express WebLog : How to: Configure Express to accept remote connections Finding this post was particularly troublesome - after about 15 minutes of solid searching, we finally found it referenced over on the SQL Education Center. At any rate, we switched over to accessing the server directly by IP address and it worked perfectly. Since it was easier to test by using a DSN with ODBC, even though we really use a connect string, we were able to pull back the Connect string easily with SQLGETPROP. ln = sqlconnect("TestDNS...

Tod McKenna points to a Financial Times link about David Fulton. I guess there's another  hobby that makes for good investments. Tod means Fox (b): David Fulton Powered by ScribeFire .

Robert has an interesting post on the delay of PDC (that Craig also wrote about) but I think he nailed the reason - nothing to show. I usually hate to pull direct quotes from a post but I need to put it into its right context. Key thoughts: "After all, if Microsoft is unwilling to use it (.Net) to develop Windows or Office, why should the rest of us base our life on it? ... .NET still takes too long to startup and load into memory and because Windows is now being compared to OSX they can’t afford to ship components that would slow down Windows. ... yes, .... the .NET runtimes ship with Vista. But almost no Vista code was written in .NET (if any, actually). Microsoft tries to keep this secret because they know it gives a black eye to .NET. " Let me be straight: I like the promise of .Net - I'm as excited by it as I am about the next version of Visual Studio! I love what Silverlight promises - I think WPF can be awesome - and I know that the next generation of applications ...

Get a load of the picture here. It's clearly VFP 9 help - there's nothing that would say anything else except for that little blurb on the side: This page is specific to Microsoft Visual Studio 2005/.NET Framework 2.0 Other versions are also available for the following: # Microsoft Visual Studio Codename Orcas The direct link is here . However, if you go down further on the page, you'll see that Microsoft is trying to encourage community redesign of the MSDN library. You can add community content about any particular element of the VFP help file. Definitely helpful - makes me wish that the Task Pane or VFP itself had an option to push developers directly to the MSDN online help, instead of the regular CHM file. That did make my Friday though. FoxPro VFP

First off, the sky is not falling. Yes, Craig has identified that the Sydney VFP User group is closing down and Rick Schummer spent a day of .Net. But that doesn't mean a massive exodus from FoxPro - it simply shows the real world. I've been trying to resist linking to John Koziol's Jiffy Tech post as so many others already have, but he makes a great point that the development world has changed (John's recent posts on the World of Tomorrow are interesting to read as well) I installed Wakoopa to gauge what tools I actually use. FoxPro is NOT the number one tool I use - Firefox is, but then I use Remote Desktop connection, or Word, or Mind Manager among other tools. Yes, FoxPro is higher than the others but the days when the only tool I used was FoxPro is gone. And it should be. There are other tools out there that help achieve results and they should be used where other tools fail. I just finished a FoxShow interview with Kevin Cully about FoxForward . Here's a conf...

I've worked with out-sourced developers from other countries and recently had a situation that had me completely dumbfounded until I found it. In our user table, we stored encrypted passwords. When I ran the system using a standard startup process, it recognized the passed password without a problem. Then I ran it with an automated scheduling tool and it came back with an invalid user. So then I ran the automated scheduling tool directly from within FoxPro and it worked. I put code coverage on it, I put in message boxes and tracking (since you can't really bring up the debugger from within a runtime app) all to no avail. The passwords used in the development or standard approach simply didn't match the ones from the automated scheduling tool. What could the problem be? I knew it had to be the codepage . I tried checking the various code pages on the open files. They all appeared to be the same but then I saw the problem. The automated scheduling tool was including its own C...

10 days ago, Scoble asked What will Steve Jobs kill next? Perhaps more importantly, he asked "How about you, which feature are you getting rid of to make your product/service/store/business simpler?" I think application developers have a real tendency to thrown in "everything but the kitchen sink". It's not because we want to - but more because after years of experience, we want to be ready "just in case" someone asks for a feature. Yet the end result is overloaded apps with not just too much functionality, but also a need for complicated user manuals and training. But after users have used the application for years, it's really hard to take away a function or feature because there may still be a group of users who want to use it. I've been going through this recently and have found myself turning off or hiding features in one of my applications. But I still can't take myself to take away the feature - instead, I've just hidden it (usin...

Craig called it quite a while ago DevBlog: No more 32 bit OS from Microsoft But the main post referenced notes that this is where Microsoft is headed but I found the previous post a bit more interesting. Is Vista One Step ahead? talks about how important Microsoft feels it is to push the hardware and software edge so the future can do so much more but with Vista, it may be a case of too much, too soon. They want to harness all this great new hardware but as Joe Wilcox notes: It's easy to knock Vista because the experience isn't that much better than Windows XP. But the foundation for the Wow is there. The applications are not, and even there Microsoft shares blame with its partners. Windows Live Messenger should be a showcase for Windows Presentation Foundation and other .NET Framework capabilities. Yahoo showed off a real Vista instant messenger in January. It's now May. Where the hell is it? The question I have is one that developers face regularly. What is the "wow...

I noted earlier how much I appreciated Eric Sink's Requirements post - I also agreed with his issue about hard it is to get a good spec. It should start off as a document but then eventually turn into a To-Do list. One of the tools I use frequently is MindManager from MindJet. It's a great brainstorming tool but I decided to try and use it for writing a small project spec recently. As a spec tool, it actually meets the various critiera that Eric sets out. You build your entire spec with key issues and elements (I've attached a PDF of the Map here: <img src="http://www.aksel.com/KeyChanger.jpg"> So, you can easily export the document into Word so it can be a real document to give to customers or managers. But then when you are ready to manage it, you can export it to Outlook Tasks (for smaller items), Microsoft Project (for full project files) or any other tool. I've exported it to a set of web pages here In my project, I actually take it from Mi...

Sometimes I think I should simply have an automated link to Eric's blog because in most cases, whenever he writes something as he just did with Requirements , it ends up being something that everyone, including those in Project Management and software development, should read. I especially like "The only way we ever know that a feature absolutely must be in the product is when one of our Sales Guys calls up and tells us that he already promised it." Especially valuable is his explanation of what a spec should be, could be and usually really is. Powered by ScribeFire .

I just looked at my notebook which was up during the weekend. While the one page loaded was Newsgator (and not much else), Windows was reporting low virtual memory. I took a look at the task manager. Egad!! I wonder what it was accelerating that required it to take over a third of my computer's memory. Since Firefox is also known to be a bit of a memory hog when it's been running for prolonged periods of time, it's always a good idea to shut down Firefox (and maybe even Google Accelerator) when not in use. Anyone else seen this?

It's funny how product development works. You work on a tool for so long that you almost forget when it came out. Visual FoxPro 9 was released in 2004 - a good 3 years ago. I recall back in the Advisor Devcon in 2001 when MS totally blew their opportunity to introduce DotNet into the FoxPro community. It was too bad. But even now, when I was doing the FoxShow   with Rick and Markus and others about which version of Visual Studio to get into, the issue about which version continually came up. You could learn the ADO.Net from earlier versions, or you could wait for Orcas (still waiting but it's a lot closer). You could use Winforms or switch over to WPF (just about there) and now, from Info week, we get How Long Will You Wait For Silverlight? - Microsoft Blog - InformationWeek suggesting that it won't be available until the spring of 2008. It's a tough call for developers - do you develop in the current tool of the day (which today would be VS 2005, even though I...

Eric Sink writes a great post about marketing to developers: How would you reach YOU? I read this and immediately thought of Kevin's Keynote post - how surprised he was with the people who were hearing the announcement for the first time. Obviously the FoxPro community has a lot of different avenues: devcons, user groups, forums, podcasts, magazines and perhaps more importantly, right within the product itself, the task pane. So why are developers not hearing about the news? What can we do to make it clearer? Powered by ScribeFire .

Since Microsoft is going cross-platform with Silverlight and DotNet, it seems that instead of only encouraging Microsoft to reconsider VFP development, some energy might be better spent encouraging them to open up the VFP Eula to allow running on other platforms (such as done via the WINE project). Some reasons to consider this: 1. It would not require Microsoft to deploy additional development resources into FoxPro - instead, it would require some legal resources to make a fairer licensing agreement. 2. Developers who have been looking for ways of deploying their local data applications on Linux have had to ignore the Microsoft name. If VFP applications were able to run on Linux, it could offer more credence to other Microsoft's initiatives on those platforms. 3. You can do it already - save for the EULA. Whil Hentzen has shown this years ago. At that time, Microsoft then re-did their EULA preventing you from running VFP apps on anything other than a Windows desktop. But if Micros...

I've been using Delicous for years but never really found a way I was happy to share the links with others. But for right now, I'm going to share this via this page , linked via the term foxprodevcon. Only one post so far, from Rick on arriving but hopefully much more to come. akselsoft's bookmarks tagged with "foxprodevcon" on del.icio.us Powered by ScribeFire .

Craig points to a great demo of one of the Silverlight promises: dynamic language runtime. While it would have been nice to have seen VFP being one of the languages (I wonder if the http://www.etecnologia.net guys have looked at cracking this), it does offer a window on the power of XAML. But Craig, this really isn't a great "Command Window" - but then on the web, what is? Powered by ScribeFire .

There are a LOT of FoxPro blogs out there today - many more than when I first started blogging back in 2003. Even more so, however, are there some great posts on ways to do things. While I try to link to each and every one, I don't always get the chance Here are some links to the ones I have found valuable and interesting recently here in case you missed them: Doug Hennig on Working with Tasks in Vista: How To and then Elevating Calvin Hsia on Fixing the BorderStyle Paint problem with Vista Area (all these posts aren't about Vista - I'm not even running Vista, neither is Kevin as noted here - in fact, Trish is running Vista and she continually talks about wanting to move back to XP - it may be more secure but the constant asking "do you want to run" almost reminds me of Clippy saying "It looks like you're writing a letter, can I help?") Vassilag - Vector Drawings with GDI+ Tod McKenna - the Mysterious Replace command and his improved Median functio...

At the risk of "do as I say, not as I do" (as friends will note, I have been unable to attend a lot of conferences of late), Kevin makes a great point about attending conferences: "With all the hoopla over FoxPro, no VFP 10, the petition, the signers, the non-signers, the reasons, the Roadmap and the need for "answers", there's one thing you can do to show Microsoft that VISUAL FOXPRO MATTERS : Go to a conference this year. Pick one, two, or even more. But most importantly, GO!!!" And with the start of the Advisor Devcon (PLEASE- someone be blogging this) and the rest of the conference season, I second that statement. As well, if you're a conference or user group organizer or speaker and want to talk about your sessions on the FoxShow, please get in touch with me. While I may not be able to attend, I definitely want to promote these as great ways of reaching out to the rest of the community. Rick Schummer does a great job of this with his regular...