The LA Fox Developer

A Newsletter for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California

March 1994

LA Fox President’s Column

by Chuck Williams

February User Meeting

February was one of those bonanza months for

FoxPro folks, with opportunities to hear several

leaders of our nationwide community right here in

LA. Bill House of Flash Creative Management leac

off the meeting with a discussion of Object On-

ented Programming in FoxPro. The slides and

ideas were based on his similar presentation at thE

last FoxPro Developers Conference. He was not

positioning FoxPro as an object oriented language

but rather was showing how you could implement

several aspects of an object oriented design using

the existing FoxPro language. His recommenda-

tion was to start thinking this way now to be ready

to take advantage of the richer object oriented

capability in FoxPro 3.

I will have copies of his paper at the user meeting,

but here are a few of the ideas - compared to our

usual programming solutions, an OOP solution

looks more like the problem as perceived by the

user - that is, the program model is closer to the

real world and is thus hopefully a better model that

is easier to understand, implement, and evolve:

1. The design focus is on entities rather than our

usual emphasis on process and procedure.

2. Objects are self contained with a well defined

interface and interact only by means of messages.

3. Objects contain code and data with external

access to the data accomplished indirectly via a

message that invokes an internal method.

4. Change can be managed more easily since

implementation details are hidden behind the

object interface, so the implementation can

change without requiring changes to all interacting

elements.

XPro User Group News

by Randy Unruh

LAST MEETING

Bruce Braunstein came, as promised. Every one

learned something new (even Chuck Williams!) and

was impressed with Bruce’s on disk FoxPro magazine,

FoxMasters. Bruce also shared some interesting third

party goodies and a graphical presentation written by

Pat Adams on FoxPro configuration.

NEXT MEETING

We will be taking a cursory look at PowerBuilder, what

it is, what it does and the line-up of PowerBuilder

products. There is a new product in the PowerSoft line-

up (PowerBuilder Desktop) that has been build as a

FoxPro Killer so every FoxPro aficianado should have

some interest in this subject.

We will also be looking at Gladiator, a FoxPro to C

translator that allows a FoxPro developer to write

small, fast exe’s.

I thought the following messages might be interesting

to FoxPro developers and anyone with an investment

in Xbase products. As usual, the>> symbols mean a

piece of the previous message from the person being

addressed.

THE FUTURE OF FOXPRO

Sb: Foxpro Future

Fm: FOXFORUM REP 623833

To: Chuck Hinkle 72154,1543

Chuck,

>>>l heard a rumour MSFT is abandoning NT.

Not likely, as they are using it to replace LAN MAN-

AGER. It is a vital part of MSFT’s long range strategic

plans. As for NT version of software, I suspect that it

won’t matter as 32 bit Windows apps will probably run

on both NT and Chicago (Windows 4.0).

Inside this issue

FoxPro 2.6 ... Not a Rumor! - Page 4

The MAC Attack - Page 4

Books and Toys - Page 7