Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

When speaking about VFPx at last year's Southwest Fox conference, it became evident that there aren't a lot of avenues for finding out how to use various pieces of VFPx. So as part of the FoxShow , I'm creating videos designed to showcase VFPx components, starting with the Control Renamer. If you have ever wanted to rename a control in a class or form but were hesitant because of missing other code references, the Control Renamer is definitely a tool you want to try. Now, there are lots of areas where new options can be added into this tool - but they are primarily "extras" like setting color settings or some logging. Check it out below! FoxPro VFP

The latest episode of The FoxShow features one of my sessions from Southwest Fox 2008: Profiling and Refactoring, a discussion on how to refactor and how the VFPX Code Analyst can help. This session was given twice : this was the second time around. It was a good discussion including a back and forth on the benefit of comments. I, of course, took the controversial position that all comments should be banned from code except when they explain WHY something was done.

One of the sessions that I didn't get to attend last night was the "Show us your apps". I think that session would have been really interesting. Many of the attendees I spoke to were fairly shy about their own FoxPro applications. They would talk about it (as it is their "baby" so to speak) but when asked about specific features that they should show, they seemed to shy away. That's unfortunate - because I don't think I've ever seen a single FoxPro app (with the possible exception of some purely framework-based apps) that hasn't included a unique feature or hook. That's one of the reasons I'm particularly excited about Cathy Pountney's session about customization vertical market apps.  Only problem is that it's on right when I've got to get ready to leave. I think I'll have to corner her separately for a quick interview. But back to my point, one my client apps is an application that was ported from DOS and brought kicking...

At Southwest Fox last night , we had a VFPX Meeting (that was also screencast over uStream). The meeting went on for just under 2 hours but a lot of great ideas were thrown about, including ways for others to get involved, without having to code (something that many seemed to like). I recorded it all for the FoxShow and while the audio may be iffy at times, it's a great listen! Enjoy! The FoxShow

If you haven't been trying out the VFPX project FoxCharts , or you tried but were a little frightened by how to implement it, here's some code that I wrote up quickly to build a nice little pie chart. I call it GenPie and it gets called with any table and it will summarize it for you. DO GenPie with "issues","cstatus","1","","Count of Issues" or DO genpie WITH HOME()+"SAMPLES\DATA\ORDERS","to_country","order_amt","","Orders" The code essentially creates a form, drops FoxCharts on it and then uses a built-in cursor to create the chart. You can also pass it a Filter (before the title) and the starting color (in RGB). DO genpie WITH HOME()+"SAMPLES\DATA\ORDERS","to_country","order_amt","","Orders",RGB(255,150,255) Here's a sample: LPARAMETERS tcTable,tcDirField,tcSizeField,tcFilter,tcTitle,tnStartColor PUBLIC ox ox = CREATEOBJECT...

Craig Bailey blogged recently about a new product, Elcom, had introduced with a name of Elcom TrainingManager.Net . In his post, he briefly mentioned they were talking about renaming it and one of the responses was from a company named Igor that talked about the importance of naming. By now, I think everyone has seen the Microsoft iPod parody where it shows what Microsoft marketing might have done with an iPod and certainly, while it was done as a joke, the reality is Microsoft's product naming conventions can be a bit tedious. How many different versions of Vista are there? And they all start as Windows Vista . And don't get me started on Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for Database Designers (they did clean this up slightly in 2008) - it's almost as if marketing gets paid by the word when they come up with a product name. Craig has done a nice job with his CLARITY posts that attempt to explain certain products and his post on Microsoft's online offerings (Live=...

Rick had posted two weeks ago about how some VFP updates were coming down the Microsoft pipe. They were released recently but unfortunately, have some glitches. Shedding Some Light - Comment I typically use the VFP online help or rely on other sources but it might be nice if the entire help file could be "codeplexed". That way, the Fox team doesn't have to pull their resources from all over to get it done and community members could get it cleaned up. Just a thought.  

Just about every FoxPro application has a need to store settings. Whether it be the startup folder or various application preferences, they have to be stored somewhere. Of course, that begs the question "where"? Back in the DOS days, many developers stored settings directly in a DBF table. This sometimes created a table with one record and lots of fields which was immediately useless once you had more than 255 settings (many applications continue this tradition today). When Windows started becoming popular, many started to follow the INI approach, creating settings like [application] suppresslogin = true name = george [timezone] This approach is still used and has support in the FoxPro Foundation Classes (and in the Solution Samples). Developers have also embraced the Windows Registry (especially with Win XP). It's very handy because you would easily separate out MACHINE level settings from USER specific settings.  Problem these days is that writing to the Registry is pr...

Rick writes about some of the news from the Microsoft MVP Summit - that there are updates coming down the pipe for VFP 9: one more cosmetic (in my mind - documentation updates) and one more important (a bug fix for a reporting error). Regardless of whether this addresses your favorite VFP 9 SP2 bug , this is good news all around - because it does show a willingness on the part of Microsoft (ok, who am I kidding here - on the part of Alan (yag), Calvin, Milind, Richard and some others) to work with the VFP community and its effort to continue VFP. Woody commented in an earlier post about the possibility of lawsuits against MS for breaking existing apps. I don't think that will happen (while you can sue for your car having design flaws that kill, you can't sue for your car breaking down - of course, someone could prove me wrong here). In my case, I'm still optimistic about some other fixes - seems like the MVP summit had a lot of good feedback going both ways...     Blog...

Don’t Let Software Die ~ Chris Pirillo Interesting post regarding TuCow's decision a while back to stop updating Blogware. It reminded me a little of VFP in that it's a company that has decided to stop updating one of its software packages. Chris' comments on the letter: >> What worries me most about building communities on closed platforms is that as soon as those platforms change direction or stop innovating, you’re locked into a toolset that has nowhere to go but down Whoa! Does this sound like VFP and FoxPro? Read on... >> Tucows has given absolutely no indication that they’re interested in opening the platform at all - leaving you in more of a no-win situation. You can't fault Microsoft for not wanting to open up the VFP engine - as that has given a lot of its other products some definite improvements but the re-licensing of the xBase components certainly does show that they were interested in not killing it outright. Indeed, I think Microsoft deserves...

Hmmm---need charts in VFP? Cesar shows you powerful charting from VFP - With no ActiveX controls, dlls, or 3rd party products VFP IMAGING : FoxCharts !!! Yes, it requires GDIPlusX from VFPX but what a great project. Hey Cesar, put this into VFPX directly - this totally rocks!

If you haven't checked out Emerson Reed's Themed Controls for VFP, you definitely need to. The link here ( VFPX - Home )  shows some samples and there's a video as well but why not simply download the sample code and run it. One key point: don't build the SAMPLE project and try to run it - just open it, and run MAIN.PRG for best results. It combines the use of GDI+ and other VFPX projects (CTL32) and just makes the sample app look beautiful. I'm running an earlier version on some of my apps (and they work beautifully) but now I'm definitely going to upgrade to the most recent update. One key thing to keep in mind: it's all NATIVE FoxPro!   Blogged with the Flock Browser

Want a blast from the past? Check out this 1990 ad for FoxPro 2.0 up on YouTube. Foxpro - The Evolution of a New Standard Not sure, where it played but very cool to watch. Lots of footage with Dr. Dave but also some great cameos with Adam Green, Tom Rettig, Richard Grossman, Pat Adams, Walt Kennamer, George Goley, (not sure about some of the others: Lucy Lockwood, Michael Masterson) memo fields: "text processing...the single biggest new market opened up by FoxPro" I remember when 2.0 first came out for DOS (I was building apps with 1.1 as well as FoxBase+Mac) There's another funny one here back from 1993 featuring Brad and Karen - I guess this is back when Microsoft's marketing budget wasn't quite as big. Now we need a VFPX video! -  oh yeah, there's an older promo one right here .

Many developers who want to get involved with VFPX face a bit of a challenge, especially if they've never used Source Control. (What!?!?! You've never used source control) When I started working on the Code Analyst, I used the SCCI provider within VFP but it always conflicted with my own SSC tool (SourceOffSite). There's also a TeamPrise Explorer or one built directly into Visual Studio but within VFP, I wanted something a little more, um, basic. So there's a CodePlex SC command line click, that's really easy to work with.  I'm still experimenting with it - but in the end, I think it may be the way to go. One thing to realize though is that it will give you FULL access to the VFPX project, which includes LOTS of sub-projects. I only wanted to work on the Code Analyst but as a result, I ended up getting everything. I don't think that's a bad thing because it makes it easier to really appreciate the entire scope of the VFPX project. After all, this IS the...

No....not me (yet!)...but the FoxShow just turned 50 ! After 49 not so regular episodes starting in March of 2005, we've hit 50 with hopefully the last of the rushed episodes (rootkit, rebuild, repeat as I mentioned earlier) but also with a great interview with Alan Stevens. (I had no idea he had worked with the JFAST project among others). We spoke about FoxPro, DotNet, VFPX, TDD among other things.  We had done the interview in the middle of February but because of the woes mentioned earlier, it was impossible to get a full episode out so now it's there. Unfortunately, it was a rushed episode with very little other commentary but it still comes in around 40 minutes. Hope you enjoy.

Bo Durban has announced the first production release of GDIPlusX from VFPX is now available for download from CodePlex. GDIPlus is one of those things that look really cool but have always been hard to wrap your head around, especially in FoxPro. GDIPlusX makes it 10 times easier. Get it today! VFPX - Release: GdiPlusX 1.10 Blogged with Flock

By now, I hope most FoxPro developers (and others) have read the announcement and the various follow ups (and no this isn't meant to be link bait but more of an exhaustive way of reading about it all) E-Week Mary Jo Craig Berntson Yag's Thoughts and Comments Alex Feldstein Doug Hennig John Koziol Rick Schummer David Stevenson Randy Jean Andy Kramek Mike Feltman and I'm sure there will be more before the week is up. As is always the case when these announcements hit, people will be asked "how could we possibly have been developing with a tool that's no longer around?" I think Doug actually put it best when he said "I can continue to purchase VFP licenses for new development staff for several more years and I can continue to receive support from Microsoft until 2015. That's not definition of dead." But in my correspondence with a colleague, yag's comment about resistance to learn a tool that is 18-23 years old (C and C++) ins...

Looks like Craig Bailey got the first link up on this but every FoxPro developer needs to see it here What does it all mean? Well, yes - no more "Microsoft" VFP after Sedna and SP2 - although it is supported through 2015. But perhaps more importantly - all of the Sedna code is being released into Codeplex - so we can all extend it further. This is a very strong point as it means we, as FoxPro developers, can continue to expand on the tool and make it better. There will always be areas that we might gripe and complain (for example, why can't we get a pre-processor at compile time?) - but we can find ways around it. Myself, I would love to see them release more internals to the code under a similar license but I don't think that will happen. However, if you've read the other Craig's blog of late, you'll see that Microsoft is now switching whole-heartedly over to a 64-bit platform , which VFP was never going to support. Whether this is a good move for Micro...

This is great news! Kevin Ragsdale's Desktop Alerts, which he has showcased in various meetings, is now part of the VFPX project. If you haven't seen it - basically imagine having the Outlook 2003 Desktop alerts within your own FoxPro application. Very cool and an awesome addition! FoxPro VFP