The L A Fox Developer Newsletter

June 1994

Special Announcement....

An Evening With Les

July brings a very special guest to Southern Cali-

fornia.

Les Pinter, author of numerous books on FoxPro

techniques and programming/development strate-

gies, as well as The Pinter FoxPro Letterand

contributing writer to many national publications,

will be the featured speaker at the July meeting.

He’s offerred to speak on a variety of subjects from

his current favorite, Rapid Prototyping, to “writing

your own browse” and “writing spreadsheets in

FoxPro”, or a subject of our choosing.

PLEASE NOTE !! Because of scheduling coordi-

nation with the Orange County MS FoxPro Devel-

opers Group, the July meeting date of LA Fox has

been changed to July 12. 1994 . Please mark this

new date on your calendars. Regular “third Tues-

day” meetings will resume in August. Because of

the expected crowd, we would advise arriving

early.

LA Fox President’s Column (Con't from P. 2)

fields, filtered indexes with For clause, unique

indexes). As in the Goley treatment, he includes a

section which compares different search strategies

in different data situations. Bob Grommes, in his

book Inside FoxPro 2.5 for Windows, offers a

different and very thoughtful treatment on pro-

gramming for speed in Chapter 12, a good treat-

ment of indexing and searching in Chapters 6 and

7, and a thorough treatment of SQL and Rushmore

in Chapters 27 and 29. And Lisa Slater describes

Rushmore in Chapter 7 and has some interesting

thoughts on optimization in appendix B. As you

can tell, this a topic with many aspects, that can’t

be reduced to a few pat answers.

And don’t forget there are many other factors in a

complex application that can affect the user’s

perception of performance. Most notable is the

slowness in redrawing screens in a GUI environ-

ment like Windows or Macintosh. Sometimes it

doesn’t matter if the DBMS was blazingly fast in

recovering the answer, if it takes the presentation

program several seconds to display the answer.

For a good treatment on this topic, look for Alan

Schwartz’ article in the May FoxPro advisor magazine,

where he presents techniques for clever use of the

Show Get command to minimize repainting delays.

Your design for locking and concurrency control can

prevent response delays that make your application

appear sluggish in a high traffic situation with many

users trying to query and update the data files at the

same time. Careful design of your SQL Select state-

ments to avoid many-table joins and Distinct clauses,

can make a huge difference in response time.

In summary, achieving good performance in a com-

plex application is anything but automatic. It requires

expertise gained by experience and in part by listening

to people like Perry who have been there - thanks for

sharing with us, Perry.

Interest in FoxPro version 3.0 continues to build,

especially with the apparent imminent release of

Borland’s dBase for Windows. I was in Redmond last

week and talked to several of the FoxPro team. Noth-

ing is in concrete yet, but the situation taking shape is

- Devcon in January in San Diego. The team is excited

and optimistic about 3.0 but obviously non-commital

this far out about release date. One could guess that

they would expect to have 3.0 released or very close

by the time of Devcon - that’s my guess, not anything

from the horses mouth.

Mark this one on your calendar for two reasons - Les

Pinter will be our guest speaker - and the meeting is

on Tuesday, July 12, which is earlier than our standard

“third Tuesday” schedule. Les is well known in the

FoxPro community for his knowledge and his wit. He

has published a long standing, regular newsletter, The

Pinter FoxPro Letter, is a regular columnist for

Pinnacle’s FoxTalk newsletter, and has appeared in

many other national publications and conferences.

This should be a fun meeting - don’t miss it.

Announcements

If you want classroom training, The Information

Management Group offers a series of multi-day

FoxPro courses focused on the Power Tools , which

will be held in Los Angeles in July. I have a brochure

with course descriptions and dates. You can register

at (800) 922-2019. They also offer two Advanced

FoxPro development courses but you have to go to

Chicago (the city in Illinois) for those.

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