The LA Fox Developer

A Newsletter for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California

June 1994

LA Fox President’s Column

by Chuck Williams

May User Meeting

When Perry Andrus takes the podium we are in for

a good time, and our May meeting was no excep-

tion. Perry led a highly interactive session on

FoxPro performance issues, using notes from

George Goley’s presentation at the last FoxPro

Devcon to structure the discussion. Perry and

other members of the audience have had plenty of

personal experience with these issues, so there

was no shortage of commentary and argument,

which made for a very informative as well as

entertaining session.

Dramatic improvements in performance over the

last several years have had a profound influence

on the market for PC-based data management

systems. Forgetting all the nitty-gritty arguments

about how to properly specify, measure, and

program for performance, the fact is that you can

effectively process very large files of shared data,

with reasonable concurrency and integrity, and

with response times that are reasonable and

acceptable to business users. Getting a query

response in half a second instead of 5 seconds is

interesting but not nearly as interesting as the fact

that you can get a response in anything like a

couple of seconds when the data structure is

complex, contains a million records, occupies 100

megabytes of storage, and is being shared by 20

other people. The faster the DBMS can perform a

query, the bigger the data files you can manage,

the more users can have access, etc. When

combined with the fact that you can develop

custom solutions at lower cost and shorter times

than alternative technologies, these systems

become useful in a very large number of business

XPro User Group News

by Randy Unruh

JUNE

Borland changed their scheduled presentation from the

June meeting to the July meeting. So, for the June

meeting we had a presentation on MUPET, from Flash

Creative Management. For those Fox’ers who have

heard of MUPET (Multi-User Project Editing Tool), it

replaces FoxPro’s single-user Project Manager. It has

some way cool features, like project cloning and user

time stamping while keeping all parts of a project in

synch when accessed more than one developer at

time. We also had some discussions about surfing the

Internet.

JULY

Borland has rescheduled their big roll-out of dBASE for

Windows for July and they are bringing their dog and

pony show to Xbase. As usual, we will have a door

prize of the shown product open to all who show up.

dBASE for Windows is a fully object oriented program-

ming (OOP) Xbase development system. As such, it

should be of great interest to any Xbase developer,

regardless of whether they use FoxPro, Clipper,

dBASE or any other Xbase product. It definitely shows

where Xbase is headed.

FOXPRO CERTIFICATION

I sent following message to Tom Rettig regarding a

planned future FoxPro certification plan. Tom supports

the idea and I have some reservation which I express

in the following:

(Con?, Page 4)

Inside this issue

An Evening With Les - Page 3

DevCon Announced - Page 4

Books and Toys.... - Page 8