LA Fox Presidents Column

The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

The L.A Fox Developer is the monthly newsletter of the LA Fox User Group. The purpose is information sharing among application developers and users working with FoxPro.

Harbor City, CA 90710

LA Fox Board of Directors

Chuck Williams, President

David Van Valkenburg, Treasurer

Allen Gartein, Membership

Barry Lee, Newsletter Editor

The newsletter contains regular columns and articles from other user groups.

2210 Wilshire Blvd. - #161

Santa Monica, CA 90403

OC MS FoxPro Developers Group

The annual membership fee for the LA Fox

User Group, including subscription to The LA

Fox Developer Newsletter, is $45.

Neither the LA Fox User Group, the XPro User Group, the OC MS FoxPro Developers Group, their officers or board of directors or their members make any express or implied warranties of any kind with regard to any information disseminated, including, but not limited to, warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.

Opinions provided by newsletter articles, or by speakers, members, or guests who address the meetings, are individual opinions only, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the group. All opinions and information should be carefully considered, and the group is not liable for any incident or consequential damages in connection with, or arising out of, the furnishing or use of any information or opinions. Brand names and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

LA Fox President’s Column (con’t from Page 1)

more complete description in the April issue of FoxPro Advisor. There are several new wizards, and many dBase IV language extensions and migration tools. The essence of the release seems to be that it is intended as a dBase capture mechanism, with lots of additions that would be of great interest to someone moving applications from that environment, but not of much interest to someone who had already been working in FoxPro. But at $19.95 ( plus another $19.95 for the distribution kit upgrade), the price is right.

This was a highly spirited meeting with lots of laughs mixed in with the learning, and it continued at the local Denny’s until well after midnight - a little painful for those who had early morning work sessions on Wednesday.

Earlier this month several of us attended the Microsoft DevCast, a four hour live telecast, broadcast from their TechEd conference in New Orleans. TechEd has become a huge event with over 6500 people attending for several days of technical sessions covering the spectrum of Microsoft products and technologies. The presentations are given by Microsoft and selected Solution Providers such as Mohsen Moazami of Stanford Business Systems. It sounds like the end user equivalent of a Developer Conference. DevCast is a regular series of broadcasts on selected topics of interest to application developers. This is also done on a grand scale - a satellite broadcast reaching 150 sites around the world with an audience of 50,000 people.

This particular DevCast focused on database products and the fanfare was all about the new Access version 2.0. It sounds like Microsoft did listen to early users of version 1.0, and included a substantial number of useful improvements. There are lots of “wizards and builders” to make the user and developer interface more manageable, and much evidence of the Visual Basic user interface elements - there is referential integrity at the database level without coding, and a robust security model - there is improved integration with Microsoft Office products - there are stronger ties with SQL Server - and there is movement toward object orientation. Two burning questions on everyone’s mind - performance and resource utilization - were really not effectively answered. They used the word Rushmore to make us believe that performance would be much better than before - but how much better and how that relates to other solutions is not clear - in fairness, release day is probably a little early to expect definitive information on those issues.

There was also good coverage of SQL Server, where there is promised improvement in several areas and also confusion and uncertainty because of the rumored change in the relationship