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The LA Fox Developer Newsletter
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January 1994
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The LA 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.
LA Fox
Address:
LA Fox User Group
977 Ashbridge
Lane
Harbor City,
CA 90710
LA
Fox Board
of
Directors
Chuck Williams, President & Newsletter Editor
David VanValkenburg,
Treasurer
Allen Garfein,. Membership
George Dvorak
Warren Rekow
Bill Seldon
Barry Lee
Greg Dunn
Kiis Dahlin
The newsletter contains regular
columns
and
articles from
other
user
groups.
XPro User
Group
2210
Wilshire
Blvd. #161
Santa
Monica. CA
90403
Orange
County
Microsoft
Database
Group
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
X-Pro User Group, the Orange County Microsoft Database 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
speak
ers,
members,
or
guests
who
address
the
meetings, are individual opinions only, and do
not
necessarily repre
sent the opinions of the
group. All opinions and information should be carefully considered, and
the
group is not liable for any incidental
or
consequential dam
ages 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.
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LA Fox
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particular object. At run time the event behavior is all managed by VB with no need for the application developer to write elaborate event loops, and manage foundation reads and read levels.
It is easy to be captivated by all this interface and event jazz and wonder why we should not all immediately switch to VB as a development tool. The answer of course is that the applications that most people need developers to help with are “data centric”. That is, the primaiy reason for the application is flexible, fast, and shared access to data stored in a large and complex data structure. That’s where FoxPro excels and YB starts to fall down, in spite of its much heralded data control and close relation to Access. The data control that comes with VB3 is nice but very limited in capability although you can now get much stronger custom controls from third party vendors. The Access ability to directly access data in a “foreign” data structure now comes with
YB and could be important for some
applications, but the data definition capabilities of VB don’t come close to Access or FoxPro. And
the
third party report generator that comes bundled with YB3 is nice but not particularly good for access to data stored
on a
backend server. And if cross platform is part
of your
plan, YB strikes out. And, and, and...
In summary, YB is a great tool for developing Wmdows applications with good user interfaces but if serious data management is part of the requirement, you had better stick with Foxpro. At least you can build an event driven GUI interface even though its certainly not easy or straightforward. The reason YB is interesting to me is because Microsoft has said very clearly that the good stuff appearing in YB today will appear in FoxPro tomorrow. The promise is the ease and speed of designing great interface behavior and the power and flexibility for data access
—
the best of both worlds combined in
FoxPro
3.0.
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