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Thanks for all the fish, Calvin!

Calvin Hsia, Microsoft developer and one-time movie star,  combines two posts into one to note one great tip and one tip of the hat....

1. If you weren't involved with FoxPro in the early 90s, you may think that Microsoft's MVP program was the brainchild of a marketing expert, but in fact, it came from Calvin's listing of the "most verbose people" in Compuserve's FoxPro support forums. The program is now 20 years old, despite cutting VFP out of the program. Way to go, Calvin!

2. Onto the cool tip, when .Net first came out years ago, I was asked to evaluate the conversion of a fairly dynamic VFP application into .Net. One of the biggest roadblocks was how to handle dynamic scripting. We asked around and even .Net experts couldn't come up with an ideal situation. In other applications, I've ended up using pre-compiled DLLs, loading dynamically, to achieve similar results but I've always wanted a better solution.

Calvin's solution? Using CodeDomProvider and the CompileAssemblyFromSource method. There's a little bit of set up (creating methods that return "known values" (strings, booleans, etc) - but otherwise, compile and execute your code on the fly. Genius!

Thanks Calvin - for everything!!


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