The LA Fox Developer

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 tradi-

tion with this group. A man whose talents run

from FoxPro development to strudel develop-

ment 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 cre-

ate 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 win-

dow. 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

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 prob-

lem 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 sys-

tems, proposed, in development and produc-

tion 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

A Newsletter for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California

January 1994