Skip to main content

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.



VFPX - Home
Labels:

Comments

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
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who Wants To Be Logical? I Do! I Don't! (with Claude)

In my book, Towards Consciousness, I explore PET , a theory that attempts to explain consciousness and possibly how it might apply to AI. As part of the conversations with AI series, I've included this conversation with Claude.AI in which we were talking about something very different and yet the conversation redirected itself back to PET. For the record, there is no such thing as "Colfsity". A It's interesting to me that people want to proclaim their distinction from being rigid and unlike machines, yet they also complain that the "best" people keep a rigid schedule, regular routines and logic understanding of issues. That's a perceptive observation about a real tension in how people think about themselves and what they value. There does seem to be this paradox where rigidity is simultaneously rejected as "robotic" or inhuman, yet praised when it appears as discipline, consistency, or logical thinking. I think part of what's happening is t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Merry Christmas

Whether you celebrate now, have already celebrated your past holiday, are planning to, or not, I hope you find yourself surrounded by family and those you love during this holiday season and are able to remember fondly those who are not with you. We often find ourselves buried in work, or too distracted by other problems, to share and remember a few moments with those closest to us. So many of us are separated by huge distances, we often find it easier to focus on those who are out of arm's reach yet so easy to connect with online, instead of those who are right beside us. So do yourself a favour, put down the keyboard (stylus, mouse, etc) and spend that time. I know I will. Merry Christmas. Powered by ScribeFire .
4 comments
Read more

Comparing education systems based on their technology

(yes, I originally found this blog because of Scoble's note on it BUT it was kind of interesting all the same) Read Alex Mallet's summary of his first week at MIT. Malletrivia: Summary of the first complete week Wow - "There's an incredible amount of material packed into each lecture" - and it sounds interesting... Compared to some of the lecture content I have seen at our universities, you really must get what you pay for. While it sounds like Alex is writing frantically down notes in his classes, at least he's finding something worth writing about in them. Case in point: one of our local universities ( Carleton ) puts some lecture classes on the TV (like many universities do) - but you would think they purposely find the most boring professors to teach them. They put up PowerPoint slides with 30 points on them, speak in monotone voice (yes, imagine the typical caricature of the university lecture from years ago), tell the students to print their...
8 comments
Read more