The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

February 1994

Books and Toys...... Toys and Books

by Barry R. Lee

This is the first in a series of articles that will look at third-party products for FoxPro. The idea for this column came from a friend of mine who mad a remark about some of the odds and ends in my FoxPro support arsenal. Some of the products I’ll be examining in the coming months will be vanou books and FoxPro add-ins, some of which we’ve all seen in demonstrations, but have had little opportunity to investigate, much less use.

This month - FoxExpress - billed by Neon Software as the “ultimate FoxPro productivity tool”.

This is a great tool for prototyping applications. We all met Mike Feitman when he was here in California demonstarting the system. (I first got a glimpse of this add-in at dFair last spring.) The development environment within FoxExpress supports an already-rich FoxPro environment, but has quite a few “extras”.

Installation is a snap, since the system installs itself in a sub-directory of FoxPro. Once you get used to the interface, which stays amazingly true to FoxPro’s own interface, developing a prototype becomes an easy task. It’s possible to design and develop an entire application without ever leaving FoxExpress.

Since purchasing the package, at a very reasonable price, FoxExpress has already paid for itself in the business I’ve gained by being able to provide workable systems in a timely fashion. That isn’t to say that FoxExpress will ever take the place of hand-coding, but it makes the initial development period, when a client and developer are working on screens and user inteface elements, a little more expedient. It provides an excellent support library that is easily accessible for modification, so that you may incorporate your own routines within the library.

Mike is about as good as you can get in responding to questions through the Compuserve mailbox

system. (I probably have about ten pages of communications addressing everything from modifying the library functions to information about the cruises that Neon “sponsors” twice a year.

So the verdict is that this is a worthwhile product for everyone from the beginner, who is trying to understand the how’s and why’s of getting started with FoxPro, to the intermediate developer who is interested in developing a “baseline” application on which to build.

I’ve been involved in beta-testing the Windows version of this product and it looks like Neon is coming up with a winner.

It Can’t Get Any Easier.......

We’ve come up with an easy way to submit articles to the LA Fox Developer Newsletter one that has been overlooked for a long time.

You can submit your articles to either Chuck Williams

(72330,2326) or Barry Lee (72723,3422) on

Compuserve.

These articles can be on any FoxPro-related topic, whether it concerns a new technique you’ve discovered, a certain development technique you may favor over others, book reviews, etc.

The quality of this newsletter really depends on the members that support it, not just read it. And I think we’d all be surprised by the useful information that could be circulated around the membership.

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