The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

January 1994

The LA Fox Developer is the monthly newslet-

ter of the LA Fox User Group. The purpose is

information sharing among application develop-

ers and users working with FoxPro.

LA Fox Address:

LA Fox User Group

Chuck Williams

(310) 539-9439

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

Randy Unruh

(310) 399-9159

2210 Wilshire Blvd. #161

Santa Monica. CA 90403

Orange County Microsoft Database Group

David T. Anderson

(714) 282-6500

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 war-

ranties of any kind with regard to any informa-

tion 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 infor-

mation 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 furnish-

ing or use of any information or opinions.

Brand names and product names may be trademarks

or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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 man-

age 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 imme-

diately 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 cen-

tric”. 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 Fox-

Pro 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 Wm-

dows 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 Fox-

Pro 3.0.

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