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

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

Popular posts from this blog

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

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. ...

Programmers vs. Developers vs. Architects

I received an email this morning from Brandon Savage 's newsletter. Brandon's a PHP guru (works at Mozilla) but his newsletter and books have some great overall perspectives for developers of all languages. However, this last one (What's the difference between developers and architects?) kind of rubs me the wrong way. Either that, or I've just missed the natural inflation of job descriptions. (maybe, it's like the change in terminology between Garbage man and Waste Engineer or Secretary and Office Administrator) So maybe it's just me - but I think there's still a big difference between Programmer, Developer and then of course, architect. The key thing here is that every role has a different perspective and every one of those perspectives has value. The original MSF create roles like Product Manager, Program Manager, Developer, Tester, etc - so every concept may pigeon hole people into different roles. But the statements Brandon makes are often distinction...