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The LA Fox Developer
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LA Fox President’s Column
by Chuck Williams
December User Group Meeting
In this doubleheader Christmas meeting we were informed
and
entertained by
Dan
Madoni and fed holiday goodies by George Dvorak.
Dan served
up
his
expertise on Visual Basic
and
George
served
up several of his custom strudels which have become a delightful tradition with this group. A man whose talents
run
from FoxPro development to strudel development is rare indeed
—
thanks again to George.
Dan
is a former Microsoft developer now working with Ken at JPL. He dazzled us with the “basics” of how to use Visual Basic to create applications with Windows-style event- driven user interfaces. He explained the VB approach to objects, with names, properties, events,
and
methods associated with each object. He showed how easy it is to assign property values at design time or
run
time,
and
to define event responses with visual point and click tools. Each object has an appropriate set of events that VB will automatically trigger,
and
the developer defines the response to the event by writing a program in an event window. You do have to speak Basic to write these “snippets”, but the wonderfulness is in the Visual, not the Basic.
The difference from FoxPro is the wide variety of event types already built-in to the objects,
and
the ease of defining the response for any
continued on next page
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XPro User Group News
by Randy Unruh
Client Server
Redux
I have just taken over responsibility for
all
FoxPro projects on the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). The MTA has a thirty year plan for construction of rail transit in L.A. County, which has been plagued by problems of cost overruns
and
schedule delays. My first take on
this
problem is that when construction began there
was
a lack of automated control
and report
ing of management information. Many new applications have been written
and are
recently coming on-line. A number of important applications are
written in
FoxPro, including one that tracks rail construction contract changes. This application is not used in house but by outside consultants
and
contractors who access it through a
WAN.
Since there are a good number of outside users and FoxPro is not truly a WANable product, this requires nightly up and down loading of large tables. Of course, this is not optimal but it is the only way FoxPro
can
handle the situation. There
are
other systems, proposed, in development and production that face the same problem. Having coming from
JPL
and consulting for the Air Force to a new organization
and
seeing the same problem, for me, brings this subject once more to the fore.
continued on page 4
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A Newsletter
for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California
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January 1994
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