2
The LA Fox Developer Newsletter
AnnI 1994
The L.A Fox Developer is the monthly newslet-
ter of the LA Fox User Group. The purpose is
information sharing among application develop-
ers and users working with FoxPro.

LA Fox Address:
LA Fox User Group
Chuck Williams
(310) 539-9439
977 Ashbndge Lane
Harbor City, CA 90710
LA Fox Board of Directors
Chuck Williams, President
David Van Valkenburg, Treasurer
Allen Gartein, Membership
George Dvorak
Warren Rekow
Bill Seldon
Barry Lee, Newsletter Editor
Gerg Dunn
Kns Dahlin

The newsletter contains regular columns and
articles from other user groups.
XPro User Group
Randy Unruh
(310) 399-9159
2210 Wilshire Blvd. - #161
Santa Monica, CA 90403
OC MS FoxPro Developers Group
John Miller
(714) 661-5264
Subscriptions
The annual membership fee for the LA Fox
User Group, including subscription to The LA
Fox Developer Newsletter, is $45.

Disclaimer
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 warran-
ties 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 up-
grade), 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.

Microsoft DevCast
Earlier this month several of us attended the Microsoft DevCast,
a four hour live telecast, broadcast from their TechEd confer-
ence in New Orleans. TechEd has become a huge event with
over 6500 people attending for several days of technical ses-
sions covering the spectrum of Microsoft products and technolo-
gies. The presentations are given by Microsoft and selected
Solution Providers such as Mohsen Moazami of Stanford Busi-
ness Systems. It sounds like the end user equivalent of a Devel-
oper 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 defini-
tive 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
(Con’t, page 3)
Page 2

2