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VFPX & FoxPro Community - Quiet? Hardly

I keep on doing Google Searches for VFP and Sedna or VFP and VFPX to gauge traffic. It's not scientific and by in large, I use my own news aggregators for real check-ups but I like to use Google every now and then to get a reality check outside of the VFP blogosphere community.

If you do that, it would seem there isn't that much activity in the VFP world since Sedna (many searches would suggest discussions started to dissipate after mid-2007.

But this is hardly the case. Over the weekend, I noticed that Craig Boyd has continued to take it upon himself to refresh the VFPX site over at CodePlex, ensuring that ALL of the public-licensed code is now available for updates, including all of the XSource pieces and more.

Although I'm not quite sure I like the idea of prefacing all of the base VFP Components with XSource, (especially since now WE are responsible for the growth of VFP), this is great news for everyone.

Why? Let me take one tool that doesn't get a lot of respect: the Task List tool. No, it's not that sexy and most developers likely have their own individual tools for tracking their "To do" lists, perhaps through bug tracking systems or others.

And the UI for the generic task list is kind of bland. However, with a few little tweaks, it could be just as useful as the one found in Visual Studio. Consider the following possible ERs:

1 - Dockable UI (I've done this in my own environment and it definitely makes the tool usable)
2 - a possible project hook that would automatically add any compile-time errors to a
3 - integration with the Code Analyst
4 - task filtering

A lot of developers think about FoxPro as one big IDE and while it appears that way, its extensibility lets us deal with and improve the individual components to match our own development styles.

Rick lamented at the German conference that he learned that VFPX was not really well known in the VFP community. I don't know how many people use the Community Task Pane ( I do every now and then - as it's linked to FoxCentral.net) to find out what's going on but this might be one way.



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Anonymous said…
Make sure you check out Craig's sceencast at http://www.sweetpotatosoftware.com/SPSBlog/CommentView,guid,b71ea97e-8fb8-4401-ace4-b5a536fe0a37.aspx.

Rick
February 26, 2008 at 6:39 PM
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