The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

April 1994

FoxPro 3.0 Preview

by Bill Anderson

Toward the end of the Microsoft DevCast of March

30, a preview of FoxPro 3.0 was shown. Those in

attendence did not sign an NDA, so the viewers

can discuss what was shown. To my knowledge,

the FoxPro 3.0 has not even gone into alpha;

anything seen here could change or be discarded

before the rollout of the product. Neverthless, the

few minutes showing the “sneak preview” gave an

indication of the direction of the next FoxPro.

Chris Capposella did the demonstration. The first

thing I noticed as Chris was speaking was the

toolbar across the top the screen. This is consis-

tent with other Microsoft products. Chris was

talking about object orientation coming to FoxPro

as well as User Defined Classes. Chris followed

this by typing this line in the command window: x =

create object(’tazform’). He indicated that the

properties of each object and the screen itself

could be changed at runtime. Grid control as well

as change to grid control was also mentioned.

Then Chris typed x.show at the command window;

the form appeared. Chris stated that multiple

instances of the same screen could be run. He

went back to the command window, (with the

screen x still up and running!) typed yx and

y.show; there were now two forms on the screen.

Back at the command window he typed y.caption

= ‘DevCast 4’ and it appeared in the title bar of the

second screen.

Chris then said he would demonstrate inheritance

by adding a double click event. He got rid of the

two screens and went back into the code for one

of the screens. Under the PROCEDURE dblclick

he added some code (I don’t remember the de-

tails), ran the screen and demonstrated that the

double click event was now being trapped. A few

more words were spoken, but that’s all that was

shown.

If the above is any indication of what is to come,

FoxPro is going to change — a lot. I would recom-

mend preparing for another steep learning curve.

A good start would be to learn the basic funda-

mentals of object oriented programming. Also, put

aside a fair amout of time to learn the product when it

comes to market I don’t expect it to be all that difficult

once we get the hang of it, but we may have a lot of

procedural programming to “unlearn”. Not that current

techniques won’t work, but they may be superseded by

other syntax that is superior to the current model. Let

me warn you though, the above opinions were sur-

mised after only a five minute demonstration and

should be judged accordingly.

Some messages on the Compuserve FoxUser Forum

noticed some details that I missed. For instance, the

command window was visible throughout the demon-

stration. That in and of itself means nothing. But in

the context of creating multiple instances of a screen

and being able to go back and forth between the

screens indicates the event handling was part of the

screen behavior. In other words, it didn’t have to be

coded. In other words, no READ DEACTIVATE, READ

VALID, etc. necessary!

One thing I did notice throughout the 4 hours was a

consistent tendency of the Microsoft presenters to

mislabel some programming terms. For example, a

presenter would say that a block of code was “reus-

able” and proceed to cut and paste it elsewhere.

Another presenter opened up a program file and

proceeded to “drill down” which involved using the

scroll bar. But I didn’t catch the misuse regarding the

FoxPro 3.0 demonstration.

After Chris Capposella displayed the two screens and

changed a title in one, he spoke of “inheriting” a

double click event. He proceeded to go into the code,

put some code into the PROCEDURE dblclick and

reran the screen. Wrong! If that were true, all FoxPro

programmers today know “inheritance” and it would be

known as changing a procedure. Were Chris to truly

show inheritance, he would have created a new class

from the previous class and add a double click proce-

dure.

To recap, this was a pretty packed five minute demon-

stration. And by reading between the lines, one can

get a fairly good sense as to the direction of FoxPro

3.0.

My thanks go to Ken Levy for his technical assista

on this article.

[Ed. Note: See also Ken Levy’s article on Page 9]

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