The LA Fox Developer

A Newsletter for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California

July 1994

LA Fox President’s Column

by Chuck Williams

As FoxPro gets richer, and user expectations rise,

and the world gets more complex with cross-

platform apps, distributed client-server situations,

OLE communication among many applications,

and development by teams rather than single

developers, the issue of development methodology

increases in importance. At the June meeting we

were privileged to a session on this topic, lead by

another one of our own “pros”, Jim Thompson. Jim

has been operating with his consulting business,

Thompson Consulting Group, here in Los Angeles

for over 12 years, and therefore ranks among the

most experienced and successful Xbase and

FoxPro developers. The level of expertise he

brings to the party is a rare and valuable item, and

the fact that he was willing to share it so openly,

marks one of the remarkable characteristics of the

FoxPro community, and one of the values of a user

group such as this one.

Jim’s presentation topic was Minimizing Complexity

in Large FoxPro Applications, and the material was

exceptionally well organized and well presented.

This was primarily a session on methodology, with

some discussion of programming, so there were

benefits to novice as well as experienced develop-

ers, independent of whether you are working on a

DOS, Windows, or Macintosh platform. He struc-

tured the presentation around a set of charts and

diagrams , which he subsequently provided to the

audience as handouts. His style was informal and

interactive, which encouraged a high level of

audience involvement - although with our group its

hard to not have audience participation.

The discussion started with a comparison of the

(Con’t next page)

In this issue

Out and About....

by Barry R. Lee

[Ed. Note: Randy Unruh’s regularly-featured column,

XPro User Group News, will resume next month.]

A Word About Les

This month’s featured speaker, Les Pinter, is the

author of some half-dozen books on FoxPro, as well

as the publisher of The Pinter FoxPro Letter. He is a

regular contributor to Fox Talk and many other national

publications, and an international consultant.

He will also be addressing the Orange County FoxPro

Group tomorrow night, July 13, in the Microsoft Irvine

Office, at 6:30 PM. The address is 3 Park Plaza -

Suite 1800, Irvine, in the PacTel Cellular Building (405

and Jamboree). And he will be speaking on com-

pletely different subjects.

Microsoft Fox Forum MVP Awards

Microsoft announced the Annual and Third Quarter

Microsoft Support Most Valuable Professional (MVP)

Awards for Compuserve Forum members on July 10,

1994, with a formal announcement on Compuserve.

According to Microsoft:

“This award of excellence recognizes outstanding

contributions of technical expertise to the Microsoft

forums. Each recipient of the award has been nomi-

nated by a Microsoft Section Leader for their work in

the forums during the past year. The Annual award

winners are previous MVP’s who receive free connect

time in selected forums, free MS product, MS items,

and additional technical information. The Quarterly

winners receive 90 days of free connect time, MS

items, and are eligible for future quarterly and annual

awards.

(Con't, page 4)

Microsoft MVP Awards - Page 1

Hot Tip - Page 5

Traversing the GP Fault - Page 6

More Undocumented FoxPro - Page 9