David Stevenson's Talking Fox

News from Southwest Fox, at last!

2007-10-23T01:04:00.001-04:00

If, like me, you've been starved for some news out of Arizona at the Southwest Fox Conference, just head over to Steve Bodnar's blog to read some excellent posts. I had been looking around for something, anything from the conference, and the silence has been deafening. Evidently, I was looking in all the wrong places.

I've done conference reporting before (as an official reporter and also as a volunteer contributor to the Universal Thread), so I know it isn't easy to attend conference sessions and also capture some of the essence and publish it for the general Fox public. I had hoped that Southwest Fox would have some official reporters posting daily somewhere but I haven't found any such "official" coverage yet.

If someone knows of such a place, please let me know. Meanwhile, thanks to Steve for helping to fill in the blanks. I really wanted to attend this conference, but a heavy work schedule made that impossible this year. I'm glad to read that the conference was exciting and filled with great information -- and I expected no less than that from organizers Rick, Doug and Tamar.

Next year, Arizona.

A Wrong Set Order and a Big Assumption

2007-10-16T23:44:00.001-04:00

I'm feeling a little bit embarrased right now, but maybe you'll get a chuckle out of my missteps tonight.

Put these ingredients together and see what you get:

A SQL Update statement that has been in operation for over a year with no errors from a .NET application talking to VFP tables via the OLE DB Provider.
A VFP reserved word as one of the fieldnames, specifically "order", resulting in "set order = 70" as part of the update statement.
Five new fields added to the table and therefore to the update statement in .NET.
Update error "syntax error" when testing the Save function with the new fields.
A big assumption by the programmer that the problem must be with one of the newly added fields.

Result: Over 2 hours of frustration working in the .NET debugger, stepping through code, checking parameter values being created by my .NET data access code... all the while assuming that the problem MUST be with one of the new fields.

Finally, I tried the complete update statement with values in a simple VFP test program run from the command window. WOW! Syntax error, with the phrase "order = 70" highlighted in the code window.

Another big assumption -- it must be an SP2 beta problem. I wonder if they fixed it in the final release? Let's check on the other computer that still has SP1... oops, doesn't work there either.

Then, the lights went on upstairs, a new day dawned in my brain, and my heart sank.

What if the update statement never really worked at all, even during the year that the application has been in use on the customer's website? It all seems so very logical now, considering that the table being updated is a very static lookup table. The customer has certainly added lots of new categories, but evidently has never had a reason to edit the title or order of any existing categories, so the error went unnoticed until now.

The purest fix would be to rename the field, but that's not going to happen. There are too many pieces of legacy code, including ASP.NET, ASP and Web Connection, that are reading that table right now and I'm not about to upset all of that for a purer approach. When this rewrite is up and live and the old code is gone forever, maybe then I'll go for purity and change the fieldname. But for now, I'll just add the table name in front of the fieldname in the update statement and all will be well -- until the next big assumption bites me!

update categories set order = 70, etc... BAD

update categories set categories.order = 70, etc... GOOD.

I'm going to sleep now with my pride wounded, but with my application past this unfortunate incident.

SP2 Released for Visual FoxPro 9

2007-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

I was up late working on a project tonight and had a sudden hunch that I should check out the vfoxpro page on msdn.microsoft.com to see if anything was happening with release of SP2 and Sedna.

Bingo! There is now a link for the SP2 final release version and also a new (and very brief) message from Program Manager Milind Lele, where you'll also find a link to the SP2 fixlist.

In a nutshell, SP2 is here, but don't install it over a CTP or Beta verson of SP2. Uninstall those first or you'll be sorry. SP2 requires either the VFP9 Original release version or VFP9 SP1 for a correct installation.

XSource is also coming later and we should see Sedna bits appear sometime soon.

Way to go, Milind and many others who worked on this release. Thanks for all that you have done and continue to do for the VFP community!

My client fell through an FOPEN() hole

2007-06-20T11:02:00.000-04:00

I got a call from a relatively new online reseller client whose backoffice system was written (by someone else) in VFP. The orders they receive from their Amazon store have to be updated with shipping information and tracking numbers in Amazon's system. This is done when they enter the tracking number into a VFP form and click Save: the form code creates an XML order fulfillment file in a drive-mapped server folder, where it is picked up and sent to Amazon by an automated process.

They were alerted recently to the fact that their order fulfillments were not reaching Amazon, so I dug into the old code to see what the matter might be. Here is the essential code that saves the generated XML into a file:

lfhan = FCREATE(this.xmlfile)
=FWRITE(lfhan,this.xmlstring)
=FCLOSE(lfhan)

Assuming that this.xmlfile = "x:\feeds\orders\_1x3d8sfx.xml" can you guess the problem?

After looking at those three lines of code for a couple of minutes, I realized that the problem could be a missing drive mapping to drive "x" on the computer running the process. Because the code does not check to see if "lfhan" = -1 (problem creating file), the next line calls FWRITE (and doesn't check the number of characters written, which is zero in this case), then FCLOSE does nothing (since there is nothing to close).

No errors show up to the user and weeks pass before the problem comes to the surface.

Because such a complex, automated system was brought to its knees by a simple programmer oversight, I've resolved to "get it right" the first time in my work by coding in anticipation of errors instead of coding by oversight.

Visual FoxPro Sedna and SP2 betas are available

2007-06-15T14:03:00.000-04:00

The Visual FoxPro Sedna and SP2 betas are both available for download at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=05a0e7c9-43c1-417f-8810-ae7d7c66bac8&displaylang=en&tm

There is a LONG list of SP2 bug fixes in one of the four downloadable files. Although many of them seem to be obsure bugs you aren't very likely to encounter, there are some that sound pretty important or helpful.

One fix that particularly interested me: the ability to change the XMLName property (don't forget to use STRCONV to make the name Unicode) of an XMLTable or XMLField object that is already contained in the Tables or Fields collection when using XMLAdapter.

Previously, we had to get an object reference to the XMLTable or XMLField object, then remove it from the collection, change the name, then add it back to the collection, which of course changed the order of the objects in the collection. This fix is a very nice enhancement if it works (I haven't tested it yet).

So why would you want to change the XMLName property anyway? Either to change the name of the XML tag when creating an XML file from a VFP table or cursor, or to use the XMLNameIsXPath property in conjunction with XMLName to point to a certain place in the XML document (using an XPath statement) when reading from an XML document into a VFP cursor.

So, what's your favorite fix in the list going to be? Take a look and see what's there.

Thanks, VFP Team, for this great package of fixes and enhancements!

Major VFP News from Redmond - Good and Bad (Sad)

2007-03-13T22:33:00.000-04:00

Alan Griver (YAG) and the Microsoft Visual FoxPro Team announced to VFP MVPs tonight at the MVP Summit several news items related to the future of VFP. There is good news and there is sad news.

1) It's now official -- there will be no VFP 10. This has been known pretty well for some time by all but the most stubbornly optimistic among us, but had never been officially stated by Microsoft. Today it is official.

2) Service Pack 2 (SP2) for VFP9 will be released by the end of Summer, 2007, with a goal of working through as many bugs as possible between now and then. Special focus is on VISTA compatibility and the team needs feedback right away from anyone encountering bugs running VFP9 apps on VISTA.

3) The SEDNA project (the official Microsoft release of VFP9 add-ons) will also be released by the end of Summer, 2007, and it will be FREE! Earlier discussions had hinted that Microsoft might charge for Sedna, but it will instead be available as a free download.

4) The SEDNA project will be released to the community as an open source project, meaning that all of the code included in it will be available for maintenance and enhancement by the community via projects to be set up on CodePlex, the site of the VFPX open source project. Details will be released later about how the SEDNA projects will be managed on CodePlex, but regardless of any future development, you will still be able to download the initial, official Microsoft release of SEDNA as a baseline that will be supported by Microsoft along with VFP9 until 2015.

5) As previously stated, VFP9 will be supported until 2010 in normal support mode and until 2015 in extended support mode. VFP9 will continue to be available as a standalone product for several more years, but the exact date of its discontinuance as a product will be announced at a later date. However, VFP9 will continue to be available in MSDN Subscriptions until the extended support runs out in 2015.

6) The VFP MVP program will continue, so the community will benefit from MVPs with VFP as a specialty.

YAG spent a good part of the day talking with various representatives of the press before meeting with MVPs at a 5pm VFP Team Meeting to explain the news being announced today. YAG's blog contains the only official announcement so far, although the news will appear on the Microsoft VFP site very soon.

Mary Jo Foley, who has written many articles about VFP and Sedna, has written about today's announcement on her blog ("Microsoft to release FoxPro ‘Sedna’ as Shared Source"), emphasizing the open source aspect of the story.

For many of us in the room tonight, it was a bittersweet moment -- being there with VFP team members who are just like family to us and sharing with them some laughs, and also sharing a sense of sadness at the impending end of an era. Sure, VFP support from Microsoft will go on, and the community will continue to support the product, but the finality of no new release from Microsoft beyond SP2 and Sedna is a truly sad moment.

Still, it's extraordinary that the product has morphed and wiggled its way to release after release over the years -- spanning well over a decade under Microsoft's support. That's a long time for any software product. And the the fact that Sedna is being released to the community as a FREE download and also as open source is very good news for every VFP user!

We asked some questions about the VFP Team and their responsibilities, and here's the scoop. The core team and testing team and working hard on SP2 and Sedna from now through release, but by the end of the summer, they will be moving on to other projects for the bulk of their time. There will still be a VFP "alias" for email circulation internally at Microsoft so that if Support Services identify a critical bug that cannot be worked around, the issue can be escalated internally via the email alias and those with VFP C++ experience (namely Calvin Hsia, Aleksey Tsingauz and Richard Stanton) can handle the issues that are escalated up from Support Services.

All three of the core coders named above are already working part-time on various aspects of the VB.NET implementation of the ground-breaking Language Integrated Query (LINQ) feature of the Visual Studio "Orcas" release, and they will likely continue those involvements when the VFP release cycle winds down later this year. Their years of experience working with the integrated data language in VFP will help to make VB.NET's LINQ integration spectacular and very compelling for VFP coders who decide to add .NET to their toolkits.

To all the VFP team members, both present and past: Thanks for all you have done to deliver such a fabulous development product to us year after year. You are all awesome!

Now, back to work. I've got several VFP9 projects underway at the moment, and I expect that to be the case for years to come.

Dave Crozier's Prague DEVCON Report

2006-09-12T08:27:00.000-04:00

Dave Crozier has just blogged about the first day of the Prague VFP DevCon, with lots of interesting details from Alan Griver's keynote and a few of the first sessions.

You might want to keep an eye on Dave's blog for the next reports.

One of the most interesting parts of the keynote relates to interop between VFP and WinForms, but if you haven't heard much about the details of Sedna yet, you'll learn a lot from this article. (However, Dave's comments about the name "VFP10" may be a bit imaginative -- I think YAG probably just used the term "next release" as Dave noted, but I could be wrong. Time will tell.)

Excellent reporting, Dave. I really appreciate the time you put into this and look forward to the next installment.

Getting an Integer Count(*) from the VFP OLE DB Provider in .NET

2006-07-18T16:54:00.000-04:00

I'm working today on an ASP.NET project that is using the VFP OLE DB provider to talk to VFP tables also used by a VFP7 Web Connection web app. When testing a method to get a count of records matching a certain foreign key, I got a "specified cast is not valid" error message with these lines of C# code when it hit the last line:

OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand(
  "select count(*) from courses " +
  "join categorylink on " +
  "courses.topicid = categorylink.topicid " +
  "where categorylink.CategoryID = ?", cn);
cmd.Parameters.Add("@CategoryID", 
  OleDbType.Integer).Value = CategoryID;
cn.Open();
return (int)ExecuteScalar(cmd);

A quick Google search of "VFP OLE DB ExecuteScalar" led me to a helpful post by Colin Nicholls, where he shows that the VFP Provider returns a .NET Decimal data type for the count(*) through ExecuteScalar. Colin's solution was to use an explicit conversion from decimal to integer, so I followed his hints and started changing my several Count methods to use this instead:

int resultCount = 
  System.Decimal.ToInt32( (Decimal)ExecuteScalar(cmd) );
return resultCount;

Partway through converting the code, I ran across these lines and realized that THEY were working just fine in returning an Integer datatype via ExecuteScalar (this code grabs the highest PK to increment it for an insert because the old app didn't use AutoIncrement keys):

OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand(
  "select top 1 ID from categories order by ID Desc", cn);
cn.Open();
int OldHighID = (int)ExecuteScalar(cmd);

So, what was the difference? Obviously, it's not that ExecuteScalar via VFP OLE DB can't return an Integer -- just that it was not returning an Integer for the Count(*) statement. The ID field in the second statement was already Integer type, and it was handled by the cast to int with no problems.

A quick check in VFP9 showed that the select statement with Count(*) gives you a cursor with the count populated into a Numeric(10) field. That led to an AHA moment. Because I'm using the VFP9 version of the Provider, the new CAST() function is available, so I left the original .NET code as it was and just replaced

select count(*) from courses...

with this:

select cast(count(*) as Integer) from courses...

Problem solved and lessons learned.

PS -- Take note of the use of "?" as a parameter in the select statement instead of using .NET's usual @CategoryID syntax in the SQL statement. VFP can't handle the named parameters, so you use one or more ? params and make sure you add the Parameters to the Command object in the correct order.

Good info on Craig Boyd's user group presentation

2006-05-19T10:49:00.000-04:00

Rick Schummer has blogged several entries (all dated May 18) about Craig Boyd's presentation that night at the Detroit VFP user group. You can find all six of Rick's entries about the meeting here.

One interesting note is that although VFP's XP themes support allows VFP to take on most of the Windows Vista look and feel (because the old APIs are automatically mapped to new Vista APIs), there are some incompatibilities. According to Craig (who is working on contract with Microsoft on the Vista Toolkit for VFP part of the upcoming Sedna release), those Vista API incompatibilities will be addressed in the VFP SP2 service pack that is now being worked on by the VFP Team.

This is all very good news and shows that Microsoft is serious about making sure VFP apps will be as compatible as possible with Windows Vista. In fact, I'm very excited about the possibilities for VFP apps to take advantage of Vista features via the Vista Toolkit.

Universal Thread Magazines are now FREE!

2006-03-28T11:09:00.000-05:00

Michel Fournier has announced that the Universal Thread .NET and VFP magazines are now freely available (including back issues) to anyone with a UT login (including the basic, free login).

This is a great deal and is well worth your time. There are some great articles included in the archive, and I'm sure there will be many more on the way with the newly-expanded base of readers making the magazine more attractive for writers.

If you don't yet have a free UT login, you can sign up easily to access the UT message boards and magazines at www.universalthread.com.

Way to go, Michel!

Grigore Dolghin planning for Romanian VFP DEVCON

2006-03-28T10:55:00.000-05:00

Grigore Dolghin from Romania has just reported on the Profox email list that a very successful one-day Romanian VFP conference was held on March 25 and that he is now making plans for a full 100-percent VFP conference later this year or early next year.

You can read some brief comments from speaker Uwe Habermann about the recent one-day conference here.

I'm very interested in this upcoming conference because it might give me a great reason to visit some dear Romanian friends if I am able to attend. I'll announce the dates here when they have been decided.

Kevin Cully's blog, FoxForward conference, dev tool ideas

2006-01-05T16:30:00.000-05:00

My good friend Kevin Cully in Atlanta surprised me with the fact that he has a blog that I didn't know anything about. You should add this one to your list of Fox community blogs.

Two posts on the blog caught my attention in particular. First, Kevin mentions that he is working on ideas for a FoxForward Conference in Atlanta this year. We discussed this a couple of times recently when I saw Kevin at the Atlanta Fox User Group, and I hope he can find the right mix of speakers, venue, timing, and pricing model to make it a success.

Also, Kevin posted some great food for thought in "What I Want (in a development tool/toolset)".

New VFP9 SP1 XSource download and modified license

2006-01-05T14:23:00.000-05:00

Ken Levy has just announced a new VFP9 SP1 XSource download, which includes the source code to various "XBase" parts of VFP9 that were affected by the SP1 updates. Also included is a new license agreement specifically for the XSource download, which overrides the normal license agreement to allow distribution of modified versions of the XSource components.

This is a major step forward, allowing the community to legally distribute customized versions of VFP's XBase tools. (For those not familiar with what we're talking about -- VFP consists of a core EXE, plus other tools in the User Interface (IDE) that are written in VFP code -- thus the saying that parts of VFP are written in VFP.)

More details are included in Ken's January letter.

Check out Bill Sanders' TerraFox site

2005-11-18T09:11:00.000-05:00

There is a new Fox-related site/portal/whatever, started by Bill Sanders, at TerraFox.net. The link routes to Bill's EFGroup site, where TerraFox is hosted.

I haven't had time to explore it yet, but he's put out a call for info to be posted, including entries for something called a FoxGuide. This is on my list of sites to explore when I get a few minutes.

Free FoxTalk article: Bo Durban: Add Rich Text Format (RTF) to VFP 9 Reports

2005-11-02T06:26:00.000-05:00

This month's free FoxTalk article is from Bo Durban, who demonstrates a clever method for including Rich Text Format (RTF) content on VFP9 reports. His approach to the challenge takes care of dynamic height adjustments and page overflow by using reportlistener methods and an API call to the Rich Edit Active-X control.

One of the joys of serving as FoxTalk's editor was working with the authors, especially those who had not been in print before or had been out of publishing action for a while. I'm glad that Bo agreed to "run the gauntlet" and put in writing some of the secrets he used in his Moxie Objects for Visual FoxPro Reports, a cool product that may interest you.

Including Rich Text Format (RTF) content on Visual FoxPro reports has long been a difficult task. While it can be done in a limited way with a general field and an OLEBound control, that approach can't handle dynamic height and page overflow. By using a VFP 9 custom report listener and a little-known Windows message call to the Rich Edit control, Bo Durban provides just what you need to reliably include RTF text in your reports.

Enjoy!

FoxTalk gets a new editor

2005-10-31T13:00:00.000-05:00

Foxtalk will have a new editor, beginning with the upcoming December issue, and I'm happy to announce that Rainer Becker is the man for the job.

While I have immensely enjoyed my "tour of duty" for the past nineteen issues, an overloaded personal and work schedule have made it increasingly difficult to devote the time and focus to FoxTalk that its readers and publisher deserve. It is with mixed feelings that I step aside and "pass the torch" to the next editor. The fact that I am swamped with VFP development work is a good thing, but it means that I cannot do everything that I would like to do. I am confident that Rainer will continue FoxTalk's long-standing tradition of providing the community with top-notch advanced technical articles.

Rainer is well-known internationally as a leader in the FoxPro community, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, a successful businessman, leader of the large dFPUG user group, publisher of a quarterly European FoxPro magazine, organizer of the legendary German Visual FoxPro Conference, and an all-around good guy! He knows all of the top VFP authors and speakers and has an extensive network of European authors who will supplement the team of writers that you are accustomed to seeing in Foxtalk.

I have complete confidence in Rainer's ability and commitment to provide FoxTalk's readers with the very best technical content, and I foresee a bright future for FoxTalk under his leadership. You'll be able to hear more about this editor transition in the next few installments of Andrew MacNeill's TheFoxShow podcasts. Andrew's interview with me will go online right away, to be followed soon by an interview with Rainer.

It has truly been a privilege to work with a long list of top authors who over the past year and a half have shared their wisdom in print as we re-launched the newsletter as FoxTalk 2.0. To all of you in the following list of all-star authors from May, 2004 to November, 2005, I extend my heartfelt thanks: Doug Hennig, Andy Kramek, Marcia Akins, Ted Roche, Cathy Pountney, Ken Levy and the Microsoft VFP Team, Rick Borup, Randy Pearson, Lauren Clarke, Walter Nicholls, Dragan Nedeljkovich, Rick Hodder, Anatoliy Mogylevets, Pradip Acharya, Dave Bernard, Rick Strahl, Art Bergquist, Mark Vroom, Lisa Slater Nicholls, Craig Boyd, Colin Nicholls and Bo Durban.

I urge the community to give your full support to Rainer as he takes the torch and runs like a Fox!

SednaX added to the GotDotNet CodeGallery

2005-10-15T20:35:00.000-04:00

A new SednaX section has been added to the GotDotNet CodeGallery source-sharing site, to be used by the FoxPro community for collaboration on new Sedna features and add-ons for Visual FoxPro 9.

Craig Boyd announced this during his part of the keynote at the SouthWest Fox Conference this weekend, and he has already posted on the site several of the recent add-on projects he has built.

You'll need to apply for membership to the SednaX area -- details are at the link above. Let's all join in and make the buildup to Sedna our community's finest hour (er, couple of years).

Check out the Exciting VFP Solution Explorer Community Effort

2005-10-08T12:43:00.000-04:00

I just heard about the VFP Solution Explorer community project that is headed up by Craig Bailey and Scott Scovell. While they form the core "SE" team, they welcome community involvement in testing, reporting bugs, working on add-ins, suggesting features, and perhaps more.

A portion of the project, FoxTabs, is available for download in a separate Alpha version. Check out the FoxTabs screen shots for a look at your new way of navigating multiple windows in the IDE!

Great work, guys, and thanks to Malcolm Greene for a ProFox post that alerted me to something I might have overlooked otherwise. I'll be watching this with great interest, as it represents the best of the VFP community and is a very viable way for us to improve VFP9 over the next few years.

Free FoxTalk Article: Lisa Slater Nicholls: A Print Job To Call Your Own

2005-10-07T08:59:00.000-04:00

This month's free feature in FoxTalk 2.0 ("A Print Job To Call Your Own") is an exciting explanation (with source code) of controlling your own print job with VFP 9, including the ability to send different printer setup info for individual pages or ranges of pages in the report!

Lisa Slater Nicholls shows the inner workings of a PrintJobListener class and explains how it can switch settings in the middle of a report run. Thanks, Lisa, for providing this important information and code for the benefit of the community.

As is usual with Lisa's articles, this one is full of useful tips and suggestions for how you can add your own specific functionality to this set of code to fine-tune it for your specific needs.

BTW, if you ever wondered if there is a good use for the INSERT BLANK BEFORE command, you'll find it here. :-)

http://tinyurl.com/amfdz

Enjoy!

Republished Blog to Stop Spammer Comments

2005-10-02T22:30:00.000-04:00

I have removed the comments feature from this blog due to a major spike in spam comments over the past week. I apologize for having to take this step, but I will not allow spammers to make use of my search engine listings to promote themselves. I also cannot afford the time it takes to find each unwanted comment and remove it.

I also apologize if my entire blog showed up again as fresh material in your aggregator -- it appears that my only option for removing the comments (and the capability for adding comments) was to republish the entire blog after changing the settings.

Public Beta Available for VFP9 Service Pack 1

2005-09-24T00:51:00.000-04:00

Microsoft has just released a public beta of Service Pack 1 for Visual FoxPro 9 and is asking the Fox community to test it out. The SP1 final release is expected in early December, so the time for testing is now!

You can read a lengthy list of bug fixes and also download the SP1 beta here.

Kudos to the VFP team for making the SP1 Public Beta available for extensive community testing.

New Screencast Video Series: Learning Visual FoxPro

2005-09-11T23:48:00.000-04:00

Craig Boyd has been at it again -- this time burning the midnight (and beyond) oil to produce a new series of screencast videos titled: Learning Visual FoxPro. This is just the first installment for beginners, to be followed by more at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels.

Craig has recently turned out tons of great new material for VFP developers, both on his blog as also in articles written for FoxTalk and other magazines. He'll also be speaking at the Southwest Fox Conference in October, and I'm looking forward to meeting him in person there.

Thanks, Craig, for all you are doing to support the VFP community!

Free FoxTalk Article: Colin Nicholls Extends the Report Builder Multi-Selection Dialog

2005-09-08T10:02:00.000-04:00

This month's FREE FoxTalk article is from Colin Nicholls, who helped put together many of the changes to VFP9's Report System.

Extending the Report Builder's Multiple Selection Dialog

In this article, Colin Nicholls shows you how to extend the VFP 9 Report Builder's Multiple Selection dialog with additional functionality you design. In doing so, he also reveals the secrets of the Report Builder's lookup table, or registry, and demonstrates how you can substitute your own version to customize the Report Builder's native behavior.

Someone's been talking: eWeek reveals details about the .NET "Zorro" (Fox) team

2005-08-26T18:26:00.000-04:00

New details about upcoming Fox-like features in .NET have emerged in today's eWeek article, Fox in Microsoft's Tool-Suite Coop, written by Ziff-Davis reporter Darryl K. Taft.

The article hints at announcements that will be made at next month's PDC Conference, which Taft says his sources tell him will have some content about Visual Studio 2005, but will also focus heavily on the later "Orcas" release.

One of the most interesting things about the article is its reference to what the writer called the "Zorro" team, which evidently has been working on future VB data integration technologies (gee, I wonder what familiar names are on that team?). I'd also be curious to know who is behind the "sources said" in this part of the article:

In Orcas, many of the new and innovative features actually borrow from Microsoft's FoxPro database, sources said.

And the team that has been working on the VB data integration capabilities has been referred to as the "Zorro" team inside Microsoft—in homage to the FoxPro ties, sources said. Zorro is Spanish for fox.

FoxPro and Visual FoxPro are all about data, and in the new world of Visual Basic, data handling and rapid application development become fused, sources said.

As is often the case, reporters not familiar with certain tools or technologies inevitably get something wrong, as in this reference to a future version of FoxPro (I'm sure he was describing Sedna, but called it VFP9):

Despite putting FoxPro features in the key Orcas language, Microsoft has said it will be releasing another version of FoxPro, FoxPro 9.

And finally, it's good to see that those long hours of transcribing my interview with Ken and Yag have been rewarded with extended coverage via the eWeek article:

There also seems to be a move afoot inside Microsoft to break down walls between the FoxPro team and the other Visual Studio data tools teams.

Levy and Alan Griver, who is Microsoft's Visual Studio Data Group manager, were interviewed in the FoxTalk newsletter, and Griver had this to say about Fox collaboration inside the company:

"I made a blog entry a few months ago—not in much detail—that basically talked about Visual Studio Data, which is the team that reports to me. It's a team that is made up of multiple groups, if you will. Fox is one of them, and the Data Tools in Visual Studio is another. I don't believe that there should be a wall between the two teams.

"To that end, some of the Fox people are bringing some of the great capabilities of Fox to .Net. But at the same time, there are people from the Visual Data Tools team who are working now on Fox. It's not a question of resources going only one way from Fox to Visual Studio."

Meanwhile, although Microsoft will discuss Visual Studio 2005, code-named Whidbey, at the PDC, the major focus will be on Orcas, sources said.

Thanks to Atlanta Fox User Group leader Russell Campbell for tipping me off to the eWeek article in an email he sent to the AFUG membership. Here is Russell's probably somewhat-sarcastic comment: "Isn't it great that in 2008 or so, .NET will finally be able to do data somewhat like FoxPro has been doing for a decade or more?"

Ain't it the truth!

Read Calvin's Blog -- VFP Secrets Are Revealed Regularly

2005-08-09T09:31:00.000-04:00

If you are not subscribed to Calvin Hsia's blog, you are missing some great "inside info" about how VFP works. Calvin, who is the Lead Developer on the VFP Team at Microsoft, regularly posts insightful narratives about how he has diagnosed customer problems.

One great example is today's post, Interesting Form Paint Behavior, which explains some mostly-unknown facts about how VFP handles form-painting. Thanks, Calvin, for giving us the benefit of regular brain-dumps.

Free FoxTalk article: Craig Boyd's GDI+ Form Paint Solution

2005-08-04T10:42:00.000-04:00

This month's free FoxTalk article is from FoxTalk's newest author -- Craig Boyd -- and is the first in a series of articles about using GDI+ with VFP9.

In GDI+ on VFP9 Forms: Solving the Paint Problem, Craig illustrates the corner you can Paint yourself into when drawing on VFP9 forms with the GDI+ FFC classes (sorry about the Paint pun -- I couldn't resist).

Thankfully, he also illustrates and provides code for a cool and effective double-buffering solution, which relies on VFP9's ability to BINDEVENT to Windows Message (Win Msg) Events. This article is a must-read for anyone planning to use GDI+ on VFP9 forms. Enjoy!

Tantalizing hints about SouthWest Fox Conference - plan to attend!

2005-08-02T14:33:00.000-04:00

Ken Levy's August letter includes some very tantalizing hints about new data-handling features in a future version of Visual Basic.NET. Ken states that VFP Lead Developer Calvin Hsia will be presenting a session at SouthWest Fox in October that will demo the new VB data features to be announced next month at the PDC conference.

From Ken's letter: Calvin's presentation will be on great demos of new language features being added to a future version of Visual Basic for data-centric .NET programming significantly based on Visual FoxPro technology.

This sounds like SouthWest Fox will be a rockin' conference this year and will be the place to be in October. (Of course, because I'm a speaker, I'm a little biased, but I strongly urge you to consider attending this super Fox conference. It's a fabulous value!)

Sedna and the Future of Visual FoxPro: Interview with Ken Levy and Alan Griver

2005-08-01T14:18:00.000-04:00

Every Visual FoxPro developer should read my interview with Microsoft's Ken Levy and Alan Griver (Yag) about Sedna and the future of Visual FoxPro. The full text of the interview represents about 45 minutes of non-stop discussion, so you'll need a little while to read it all, but it will be well worth your time.

Thanks to Ken and Yag for setting aside so much time for my questions during the Las Vegas DevCon in June. I think you'll all get tremendous insight into the way Yag is managing the Visual Studio Data group, which includes the VFP Team. Considering recent rumors of Fox-like features eventually making their way into .NET, the interactions of the VFP Team with the rest of the VS Data group take on more importance. While Ken and Alan weren't prepared to reveal any details related to those rumors, you can read between the lines of this interview and imagine what might be happening behind the scenes.

Here are a couple of excerpts to whet your appetite for more:

David Stevenson: The obvious followup question is, "What are the chances that there will be further enhancements beyond Sedna?"

Alan Griver: It's something we'll look at towards the end of Sedna, just like we looked at Sedna toward the end of VFP 9, we looked at 9 toward the end of VFP 8, and 7 toward the end of 6. With the team that we have we basically can look one version up. Right now, Sedna is actually probably one of the bigger bets and efforts that we've taken in a while. If you think about it, the last time we've had an architectural shift in the underlying environment was when we moved from DOS to Windows, or maybe from 16 to 32 bits.

What we've got now is essentially a new platform on Windows and we need to play well on that platform. We know that it's coming over the next couple of years and Sedna is the release where we have to start taking that into account. So, all of our efforts are involved in that...

David Stevenson: I think the thing that would most concern people is whether the door is actually closed to further enhancements.

Ken Levy: A big direct answer the best we can on that question is that there is a possibility that there won't be any enhancements after Sedna, and there is a possibility that there will be. We would have answered the question the same way after we shipped 8 and people asked about what's beyond 9. We're being totally honest and we're just not dancing around it in any way. There is no one at Microsoft who has had meetings or decisions, and we're waiting for two more years to plan that out.

Alan Griver: The short answer is that the door is not closed to there being enhancements beyond Sedna. The other side of that is that we don't know what's behind the door yet.

I'll post a blog entry with some analysis of this interview in the next couple of days. The full text of the interview is located here.

Enjoy!

Ken Levy announces two new VFP case studies

2005-07-21T17:09:00.000-04:00

Ken just blogged about two new VFP case studies posted on the Microsoft site. Thanks to all who had a part in getting these done, and congratulations to the developers who used VFP to produce Sysdine People Resource Management Software and Crimestar Scalable Law Enforcement Information System!

Integrated Query Framework for Orcas - PDC Sessions

2005-07-19T09:53:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I blogged about Anders Hjelsberg, C# and VB.NET 3.0, .NET data-handling, and upcoming PDC sessions that looked like they were connected to those topics.

Today, I found this interesting blog post from a C# compiler team member, talking about the new Integrated Query Framework for Orcas and the 5 PDC sessions related to it. This confirms most of my guesses about the most important (and most Fox-influenced) sessions to attend at PDC in September.

Rick Strahl becomes a "True Southerner"

2005-07-18T20:14:00.000-04:00

Whether he intended this or not, Rick Strahl has just earned the title of "True Southerner" (meaning that he would be instantly welcomed into the backwoods of Alabama where I grew up), by posting this sentence today (emphasis mine):

To me understanding the innards of a platform always provides certain satisfaction and level of comfort, as well as insight that helps to write better applications.

The use of the word "innards" proves that he has become not only an American, but also a Southern gentleman.

Seriously, you really should read his new article titled "A low-level Look at the ASP.NET Architecture". If you ever wondered just how the innards of ASP.NET work, this is your source.

Great job, Rick, and welcome to the Southern aristocracy. :-)

A Killer-Kewl KOM post from Klaudio

2005-07-18T15:54:00.000-04:00

Claudio just posted a killer mini-article on VFPConversion's blog that shows an interesting approach to making VFP COM objects more strongly-typed for .NET COM Interop. He uses the little-known COM_Attrib and Implements features in a very innovative way.

A must-read for anyone doing COM work.

And, no... the "KOM post" in the title was NOT an intentional pun and does NOT indicate that I think his idea is a bunch of compost. :-)

Anders Hjelsberg tries not to talk about FoxPro while talking about FoxPro

2005-07-18T14:39:00.000-04:00

Malcolm Greene posted a link today on Profox to a Mary Jo Foley interview with Anders Hejlsberg about future data-handling features for C# 3.0, rumored to be based on FoxPro (you'll have to wade through a good bit of the interview before finding the references to FoxPro on the second and third pages). Here is Malcolm's comment:

After reading this article I remain convinced that Anders and his C# yes-team "just don't get it". They are sitting in their ivory tower, too far removed from real world business needs, and with (IMO) a not-invented-here type of attitude towards FoxPro.

Here is my response to Malcolm, which bears repeating here:

I agree that probably Anders and the C# team don't "get it" as much as the VB.NET guys, who are probably much more influenced by Alan Griver and his VS Data team.

I think these comments from Anders in the interview are pretty funny, actually:

Let's just say for the sake of argument that I want to make it as easy to program data in C# as it is in FoxPro. Or pick whatever goal you'd like. I'm not saying that is a particular goal.

It's almost like he's holding his nose while admitting that the FoxPro model of working with data is superior to C#, while not really admitting it. :-)

I'm expecting that the PDC sessions in September that are dedicated to new models for working with data in future versions of Visual Studio will be quite interesting. The widely-circulated quote from VS-Live recently indicated a rumor that VB.NET would be getting Fox-like features, and that Anders was also working on some new approaches to data-handling for C# 3.0. That made it sound like VB.NET might end up being more Fox-like than C# -- but it's too early to tell yet.

If they do it right and put cool new data stuff into the .NET framework, maybe all .NET languages will benefit. I'm seriously considering attending PDC this year (September 13-16 in Los Angeles) just to see the sessions likely to focus on future data innovations and check out the reaction to them:

Visual Basic: Future Directions in Language Innovation from Paul Vick
Visual Basic is designed to be the most productive language for writing data-centric, solution-focused applications. Meet with the designers of VB and learn about upcoming language features that will improve developer productivity, including new features that enable optimized queries over objects, XML, and databases in a consistent way.
Session Level(s): 300
Track(s): Tools & Languages

C#: Future Directions in Language Innovation from Anders Hejlsberg
Join Anders Hejlsberg, Distinguished Engineer and chief architect of the C# language, for an in-depth walkthrough of the new language features in C# 3.0. Understand how features like extension methods, lambda expressions, type inference, and anonymous types make it possible to create powerful APIs for expressing queries and interacting with objects, XML, and databases in a strongly typed, natural way.
Session Level(s): 300
Track(s): Tools & Languages

The following sessions also sound intriguing, but may or may not be directly related to the rumored Fox-like features:

Future Directions: Data Access and Storage
Abstract pending
Session Level(s): 200
Track(s): Data & Systems

The .NET Language Integrated Query Framework: An Overview
Modern applications operate on data in several different forms: Relational tables, XML documents, and in-memory objects. Each of these domains have profound differences in semantics, data types, and capabilities, and much of the complexity in today's applications is the result of these mismatches. The "Orcas" release of Visual Studio aims to unify the programming models through integrated query capabilities in C# and Visual Basic, a strongly typed data access framework, and an innovative API for manipulating and querying XML. This session introduces each of these areas and walks through how they are related.
Session Level(s): 200
Track(s): Tools & Languages

Using the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework with Relational Data
Database-centric applications have traditionally had to rely on two distinct programming languages: one for the database and one for the application. This session introduces advances Microsoft is making for the "Orcas" release of Visual Studio in programming languages and frameworks to help integrate relational data and queries with C# and Visual Basic. These advances enable developers to express queries and updates in terms of their local programming language without sacrificing the server-side execution model of today's high-performance SQL-based approaches. Using these advances, database queries that previously were stored as opaque strings now benefit from static type checking, CLR metadata, design-time type inference, and of course IntelliSense.
Session Level(s): 300
Track(s): Data & Systems

Using the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework with XML Data
One of the key challenges to working with XML data has been the impedance mismatch between XML and programming languages. This session introduces advances Microsoft is making for the "Orcas" release of Visual Studio in programming languages and frameworks to help integrate XML and queries with C# and Visual Basic. The advances include a framework for navigating, querying, and transforming XML that is both easier to use and more efficient than current XML programming techniques. This framework marries the capabilities of XPath, XQuery, and the DOM with the language integrated query framework planned for C# and Visual Basic.
Session Level(s): 300
Track(s): Data & Systems

You can find all of the PDC session descriptions here.

Don't miss "A Tribute to Attributes"

2005-07-18T13:06:00.000-04:00

This month's feature article in FoxTalk 2.0 (available free to everyone) is "A Tribute to Attributes" by Andy Kramek and Marcia Akins:

One of the more intractable problems we encounter when designing applications is how to handle data that's either unstructured or infinitely extensible. Traditional relational structures simply can't deal with these scenarios, so we need to turn to a more flexible design. In this month's column, Andy Kramek and Marcia Akins are trying to model people's qualifications.

In their inimitable style, Andy and Marcia debate various approaches to the problem of how to model attributes in an application they were designing. By the way, according to Andy and Marcia, the "back and forth" discussion format of their monthly KitBox column closely resembles the reality of how they work as a development team. I like it because they usually cover multiple alternatives, giving the pros and cons of each, and justifying their final choice. You will learn a lot about software development by reading their column each month.

And don't forget Andy's new blog, which is very thickly seeded with great technical articles, as well as some interesting commentary.

Writing for free vs. writing for publications

2005-07-18T12:37:00.000-04:00

Craig Boyd just blogged in GDI+ and VFP about the frustration of holding back on forum posts because he was working on code samples for publication in FoxTalk and FoxPro Advisor.

He raises some interesting issues concerning how much to post publicly that will also be included in a published article, and it's the same issue that conference speakers often have to deal with. How much helpful information do you give away for free and how much do you submit for publication or as conference white papers, thus limiting the audience?

You might be curious about the copyright restrictions placed on authors by publications and conference organizers, but there is not one answer that fits all. Some publications, like MSDN Magazine, pay authors very well, but demand absolute control of the content and consider any outside publication of the same information to be a violation of their copyright.

Other publications, like FoxTalk 2.0, have an author contract that not only gives the publication perpetual rights to publish and republish the content, but also grants the author the rights to republish the content (with proper attribution to the original source of publication) after a waiting period (usually several months after original publication). Not all authors take advantage of this right, so in some cases, the publication and its online site are the only places where you can read the article and download its source code.

By using this approach, FoxTalk tries to balance the need for exclusive content, which drives subscription income, which keeps the publication alive -- with the desires of authors to not have their content forever locked away to subscribers only.

Obviously, as Editor of FoxTalk 2.0, I want everyone to become a subscriber, which not only gets you ALL the content and downloadable files, but also access to all the archives of previous issues back to 1996! With the recent introduction of a less-expensive "online-only" subscription rate, I think it makes immense sense for every VFP developer to immediately subscribe, especially knowing the type of in-depth articles that are scheduled for the next several issues.

OK, this has obviously turned into a commercial, neatly disguised in the middle of a philosophical post (sorry about that). The bottom line is that keeping the flow of great technical articles in the pipeline is very dependent on keeping a healthy subscriber base for all of the VFP-related publications: FoxTalk 2.0, FoxPro Advisor, the online UT Magazine and possibly others that I'm not aware of.

In my (somewhat biased) opinion, a yearly subscription to all three is an absolute essential for every professional VFP developer. One article alone can more than pay for the relatively low investment, and you'll have a constant flow of new material and access to the archives to help you solve any development challenges that come along.

Back to blogging after a brief hiatus

2005-07-18T12:10:00.000-04:00

I'm back to blogging after a brief hiatus brought on by extensive travel and an overload of actual work. I don't know if you have ever experienced a hiatus, but it usually happens to everyone at some point. I'm speaking, by the way, of the non-medical type of hiatus, which is defined by dictionary.com as:

A gap or interruption in space, time, or continuity; a break: “We are likely to be disconcerted by... hiatuses of thought” (Edmund Wilson).

So, I guess you could say that every time I've thought about making a blog entry in the last 3 weeks, I have become disconcerted by a hiatus of thought. Now that the hiatus has ended, I have lots of thoughts that are ready to come out, having germinated and grown despite my efforts to ignore them. BTW, did you notice that Edmund Wilson used "hiatuses" for the plural and not "hiati"? Dictionary.com also shows "hiatuses" as the plural, so that must be right. I would have guessed otherwise.

Keep an eye on Craig Boyd's VFP blog

2005-06-25T18:56:00.000-04:00

Craig Boyd of Sweet Potato Software has resumed blogging about VFP recently, and plans to post regularly on subjects of interest to VFP developers.

Craig is a very talented developer, who will be writing regularly for FoxTalk 2.0, beginning with a great double-buffering technique for working with GDI+ on VFP forms. That article will appear in the August issue, to be followed by many more topics of great value.

Welcome to the VFP blog universe, Craig, and welcome to FoxTalk 2.0!

VFP developers learn SQL and .NET at DevTeach

2005-06-24T11:28:00.000-04:00

I just returned from a very successful DevTeach conference in Montreal, where I taught four VFP-related sessions. Conference organizer Jean-Rene Roy and his helpers did a fabulous job -- I highly recommend this conference as high on content and low on price.

Although Jean-Rene told me that about 100 of the 300 attendees could be identified as VFP-oriented developers (based on registration information and how the attendees heard about the conference, etc), it was obvious to me that most of them were there to learn about SQL Server and .NET.

A quick peek into the VFP track sessions throughout the conference (and discussions with other VFP speakers) painted the same picture of from 6 to 12 people attending each VFP session, regardless of the speaker.

There were at the most two simultaneous VFP sessions in each time slot, and some were alone with competition only from SQL and .NET sessions. The attendnace numbers tell me that most VFP developers were eager to learn SQL Server and .NET, which is to be expected with a mature product like VFP and its mostly-mature community of developers.

Personally, I have been learning "new stuff" both about VFP and about those other technologies (and some PHP/MySQL as well) for the past several years, and I don't intend to stop now. It's just good business sense to be somewhat conversant with a broad range of technologies, especially if you depend on contract work for your living.

I frankly don't believe that .NET is quite ready for the extremely data-intensive applications that VFP handles so well, but I think Microsoft will eventually get there on rev 3 or 4.

The eWeek article from a couple of weeks ago indicates that some VFP features will eventually make it into VB.NET in the Orcas release of Visual Studio. Microsoft people say that Orcas will be ready two years after VS 2005 ships this November, but I'm guessing that it really will be 3 or 4 years beyond 2005.

Microsoft is not commenting publicly on the eWeek hints, other than to say that more information will be available at this September's PDC Conference. This might be a very interesting conference for VFP developers to attend or follow online, as the information to be announced there about Orcas sounds like it has the potential to be pretty exciting.

Meanwhile, I'll keep learning the new stuff while I continue being productive with VFP as the main core platform that my business depends on. The Sedna add-ons in 2007 will give us even more features to extend VFP into the future and to leverage some of .NET's strengths while we await a .NET version that really does what we need.

I'm looking forward to the Southwest Fox conference this October in Arizona, where I will be presenting sessions on CursorAdapter and XMLAdapter. Meanwhile, if your user group needs a presentation on VFP9, let me know and I'll see how it fits into my schedule for the next few months.

Interview with Ken and YAG

2005-06-14T15:12:00.000-04:00

I just finished a 45-minute on-the-record interview with Microsoft's Ken Levy and Alan Griver about Visual FoxPro 9.0, the VFP Roadmap, the plans for the Sedna add-on release, and more.

It will very likely be posted on the FoxTalk site sometime in the next few weeks for everyone to see. I'll blog here when it's available and post a few excerpts at that time.

Stay tuned...

A Must-Read blog entry from Andrew MacNeill

2005-06-14T11:57:00.000-04:00

As you think about the implications of Microsoft's recently-announced Roadmap for VFP and Sedna "release," be sure to take time to read Andrew MacNeill's blog entry titled:
What Defines a Release?

Andrew does a great job of analyzing Sedna and the new model for enhancements to Visual FoxPro 9.0, and I agree wholeheartedly with his conclusions.

DEVCON keynote shows early Sedna ideas

2005-06-13T03:07:00.000-04:00

At the opening keynote session at the Visual FoxPro DevCon in Las Vegas Sunday night, Ken Levy and Randy Brown of the Microsoft Visual FoxPro team showed several early prototypes of features that might be included in the Sedna release in 2007. Ken emphasized throughout the session much of the same information that has been posted publicly so far, including the fact that Sedna will be focused on making Visual FoxPro 9.0 work better with the Longhorn operating system, .NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, and other upcoming technologies.

Although Microsoft says that they will not know until closer to release just how Sedna will be packaged (including what it will be called and what cost will be involved in upgrading a VFP 9.0 system to use the Sedna features), they discussed some bullet points that clarify a little more about the hazy outlines of Sedna.

One way to look at Sedna is to consider it equivalent to a VFP 9.0 SP2 with Add-ons. So, it would be more than a typical service pack, but not necessarily called a new version. However, those marketing decisions will not be made probably for more than a year. What the VFP Team expects Sedna to look like can be summed up like this:

Limited core product updates

New and improved XBase components

.NET wrapper classes for use with VFP

Additional product DLLs for extensibility

In addition to posting the Roadmap recently, Microsoft intends to release Sedna details regularly during development and also post public beta Sedna components online on a regular basis. The VFP team has its budget for the Sedna project and it getting its personnel in place to move ahead with the project. As often happens between product releases, there are some changes in personnel, but Alan Griver mentioned that two people will be joining the team very soon.

Randy showed a cool demo that Calvin Hsia had worked on recently, that hooked into Windows Explorer to call a DLL that calls back into VFP to dynamically generate information that was then displayed in the Explorer interface. For example, by clicking on a "virtual folder" in the left-hand treeview and clicking on a DBC filename, the right-hand Explorer pane then displayed a list of all files in the project. Clicking on a Table name magically showed the fields and data types in the right-hand pane. That's the type of "add-ins" that may make up some of the new features of Sedna, using DLLs coded in C that can hook VFP and other technologies together.

They also showed a Fox Feeds utility that read RSS from various blogs and pulled the information into folders in Outlook. Here is a blog entry from Calvin that explains more about Shell Namespace Extensions, which are being used for some of these demos. You also may want to keep an eye on a blog that Randy has started, called the Fox Team Sedna Blog.

Ken showed a few early examples of calling wrapper classes that made it easy to talk from VFP to the .NET framework, including calling Web Services via .NET instead of using the SOAP Toolkit, and calling an XML tranform via .NET, taking advantage of compiled XLST in .NET 2.0. He showed clicking on a button in VFP to bring up a .NET Winform. He also did the same with an Avalon form and showed how VFP could change the XAML for an Avalon form to change the visual appearance of the form. However, there will likely not be complete control of Avalon from VFP in terms of the underlying code-behind that works with the XAML-generated visual layout of the form. Much more is to be researched on these possibilities over the next year, so it's too early to tell yet just how useful this feature will be. Richard Stanton of the VFP team is regularly working with the Avalon team to see what can be done in this area.

Another interesting thing demonstrated during the session was related to the upcoming "Click Once" technology that will arrive with Visual Studio 2005. By registering a VFP COM object in a .NET project and setting the COM object wrapper's "Isolated" property to true, you get the VFP COM object encapsulated inside the .NET project and when deployed, it will not make any changes to the user's computer registry, depending instead on the DLL information contained in the project manifest file. This is a very cool capability for more easily deploying .NET applications that work with VFP COM Interop and will make this scenario much more pleasant.

Ken also showed a "My" class that is designed to work similarly as the new My namespace in VB.NET. This type of new functionality will be driven from a table, much as Intellisense is done in VFP. After instantiating the "My" object, you can then drill down into My.Computer, My.User, My.Data, My.Multimedia, and multiple levels within each of those. This will provide "shortcuts" to simplify common tasks and will be extensible in the usual Fox tradition.

New additions to the Report Designer are coming, which will enable many of the new features of dynamic formatting of report data that can now be accomplished via specially coded report listener classes. The new designer features will provide dialogs to set up dynamic expression evaluation to control which report items are bold, italic, underlined, and colored in various ways, all without writing any report listener code.

So, what will Sedna really end up looking like when it's finally complete in approximately two years? It's too early to say. However, several members of the VFP team stated in informal discussion after the keynote that the huge list of features that made it into VFP 9.0 was not really expected in the early planning stages for that product. As design and development of VFP 9.0 progressed, more and more features were added, making it a very significant release. Microsoft's Alan Griver emphasized that the VFP team will approach the Sedna project with just as much energy and enthusiasm.

My personal opinion? Two years is along time for the VFP team, and as they tackle this project with community involvement, we may all be surprised at what eventually emerges. What the team most needs right now from the community are detailed scenarios of what kind of development projects need more interoperability help from the Sedna release. Think about it, join the discussions online, and let Microsoft know what you want them to put into Sedna.

This is not all the news, but it's all I can do for tonight. Check Alex Feldstein's blog for his report, which he is frantically typing away on just a few feet away from me in the conference computer area. Craig's FoxBlog will also probably have some analysis sometime in the next day or two.

I'll post more analysis either Monday or Tuesday, after talking with attendees, Microsoft personnel, and VFP community leaders.

Stay tuned for DEVCON reports

2005-06-11T02:04:00.000-04:00

I'll be blogging from the Las Vegas DEVCON early next week, as will many of the other Fox-related bloggers. After the Sunday night keynote, where demos will be presented of some of the "Sedna" plans, I'll try to post some initial impressions late in the evening (Las Vegas time), then add more detail on Monday.

If you are attending the Las Vegas DEVCON, I'd like to meet you. I'll be around the VFP "hangout" area just outside the conference rooms (when I'm not busy interviewing or writing, or getting some "real" work done). So, stop by and say hi!

Stay tuned...

Interesting VFP developer statistics (from Microsoft survey)

2005-06-11T01:54:00.000-04:00

I saw some interesting statistics late Friday on the ProFox list, posted by Ken Levy and based on Microsoft's survey of VFP developers very recently. Ken's post stated that over 5600 people participated in the survey, which was double the number who took the previous survey in 2003.

He noted that some information will remain Microsoft confidential, but made these numbers public:

51% have used VFP over 10 years

33% are now using VFP 9.0

80% small company, 68% mid-size, 27% enterprise

71% maintaining apps, 69% new apps, 25% web apps

89% DBFs, 55% SQL Server, 22% MSDE, 21% MySql, 14% Oracle, 4% DB2

75% integrate Office with VFP apps

11% apps 1000+ users, 43% 100+, 30% under 25

26% VS.NET, 21% XML WS, 25% ASP/ASP.NET, 35% COM

20% VB6, 13% VB.NET, 12% C#, 10% Java, 8% C++

31% plan to use VS.NET within next 2 years

98% plan to using VFP within next 12 months

Items of note, from my perspective, are that 33% were already using VFP 9.0, over 50% were using SQL Server and 21% MySQL (probably some overlap there). About 25% were using .NET, with just slightly more than that planning to be using .NET within 2 years (probably not as fast an adoption rate as some at Microsoft might wish). Finally, there does not seem to be a mass exodus from VFP, with 98% planning to still be using it within the next 12 months.

I'm also not too surprised to see the stats on size of company, with only 27% in the Enterprise category -- it's no secret that a majority of big IT departments take a dim view of VFP. However, some of those 27% are running mission-critical apps on VFP. Small and medium-size businesses continue to be the largest users of VFP applications, since their "IT departments" often consist mostly of the VFP developers who know what the Fox can do!

You can check out the two posts Ken made about this in the ProFox archives here.

When did "Shorthand Hex Colors" show up?

2005-06-07T15:53:00.000-04:00

While working on the CSS styles for this blog, I was surprised to see that many of the colors were specified with just 3 hex characters instead of the usual six. For example, fuschia, which is #ff00ff, can be specified in "shorthand hex" like this: #f0f. Of course, colors that don't have matching pairs for all 3 parts of the color spec can't be done that way, like maroon: #800000.

Did I just miss a page somewhere when I was first learning HTML, or did "they" slip this one past me just recently? I can't believe that I didn't already know about this.

Drag and drop Outlook emails to create Tasks

2005-06-07T15:03:00.000-04:00

As mentioned in my June editorial, I recently discovered that I can drag and drop an Outlook email onto the Tasks menu bar to create a task that contains the text of the email message. I've been using Outlook Tasks more and more as a way of attempting to organize myself and have found many uses for this time-saving drag and drop feature.

There must be thousands of productivity-enhancing actions or shortcuts in the software I use every day, including VFP, that I have not yet learned. In fact, over in the ProFox email list recently, I saw a discussion between Nancy Folsom, Eugene Vital and Tracy Pearson that in the space of 3 emails showed three different ways to drag and drop table fields into a visual container on a form to create bound controls: From the DE, from an open DBC, and from the tables included in the project manager.

(By the way, I just tried it from the new VFP9 Data Explorer task pane and it worked there too, except that it didn't create labels for the controls. Hmm, an oversight or a bug?)

I like Tracy's comment, "...There's more than one way to code the fox," and Nancy's response, "And there's nothing like sitting down [with] another developer and just watching how they work."

Whether you are a new VFP programmer or an old hand, there is always something new to learn -- and that's one of the best reasons to attend a user group or conference this year, or just sit down and watch someone else.

Don't miss the free PDF article by Lisa Slater Nicholls

2005-06-07T12:54:00.000-04:00

Some blogs have already posted this, and I've announced it already on the UniversalThread and ProFox list, but I want to be sure that no one misses this tremendous free resource for the community.

Lisa Slater Nicholls has written a fabulous, in-depth article called PDF Power to the People, which is available free for everyone. It's in the June issue of FoxTalk 2.0 and includes a free download full of great source code, including a VFP9 PDFListener.

Lisa goes into great detail about how to solve the issue of application transparency, meaning the ability for your application to reliably install the required GhostScript files and configure a PostScript printer driver without the user having to get involved at all in that process.

While Lisa's PDFListener is for VFP9, much of the code contained in that class can be lifted out and used in prior versions. You'll also learn lots about how report listeners work by studying her code.

Just remember that in any situation where you are reusing code provided by someone else, you should give credit where credit is due. You should at least put comments into your code, citing the original source of the code you are using -- that's just common sense and good form.

Thanks, Lisa, for providing this resource for the community, and for allowing FoxTalk 2.0 to publish it!

Submit Sedna Suggestions

2005-06-03T15:59:00.000-04:00

The recently-announced Sedna project (due for release in early 2007 as some kind of add-on for Visual FoxPro 9.0) now has its own category in the VFP forum on the Universal Thread. Microsoft Product Manager Ken Levy has asked those with suggestions for inclusion in Sedna to submit posts there, where they can be viewed by members of the VFP Team at Microsoft and discussed by the community and Team.

For a point of reference, you might want to read the VFP Roadmap and Ken's June newsletter and also catch up on some of the recent discussion on the UT. Starting today, the Sedna category of the UT is up and running, and you can get a free UT account for reading and posting. I'll have lots more to say about Sedna in upcoming blog posts.

David Stevenson's Talking Fox

2005-06-02T16:38:00.000-04:00

After discovering recently that I usually have more to say than can fit into my monthly editorials in FoxTalk 2.0, I thought it must be the right time to start blogging.

So what about the blog title? You can take that any way you want (as an editor, I love to catch authors in ambiguous statements). You might think that Talking Fox is my Native American name (David Stevenson is Talking Fox), or that I'm perhaps referring to a clever pet (Wow! Listen to David Stevenson's talking fox). Or, you might think it's a lame play on words related to my editor position at FoxTalk 2.0 (I'll admit it).

The truth is that I'll be commenting here mostly about Visual FoxPro and other software development topics, and will sometimes include code samples in the FoxPro language. So, I'll literally be "talking Fox" in more ways than one.

Visit often and feel free to comment. I can also be found most days over on the Universal Thread (get a free membership and join the community for great VFP tech support) and the Profox email list (I recommend the ProFoxTech version, which cuts out most of the political noise).

So, let's kick this thing off and start Talking Fox!