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The LA Fox Developer
A Newsletter for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California
May 1994
LA Fox President’s Column
by Chuck Williams
April User Meeting
The scheduled presentation was preceded and followed by a long open discussion about the outlook for FoxPro developers in light of the growing interest in client server applications and the apparent disinterest of the Microsoft sales organization in FoxPro.

Microsoft as a development organization is certainly performing at championship levels, with delivery of their promised full featured, high performance, cross-plafform FoxPro 2.x products. And the promise for FoxPro 3.0 is very exciting and quite believable. So from a product standpoint we could not be in better position. The concern is with marketing - the primary database thrust at Microsoft customer promotion sessions such as Tech Ed and DevCast is Access, and most of the Microsoft sales organizations have not embraced FoxPro as part of their solution set. Our clients and prospects are confused by the fact that Microsoft sales people never even mention FoxPro much less aggressively sell it, and in fact don’t seem to know anything about it.

However, FoxPro today is a powerful product, with which we can build applications that are useful to a larger set of clients than ever before. We can compete effectively with similar products now, and the improvements coming in FoxPro 3 will further expand the market and strengthen our competitive position. I am delighted that Microsoft continues to interact effectively with the developer community, but I suspect they view the market for FoxPro as large but bounded, without the growth potential of other markets they are addressing - a market to
(Con't, page 2)
XPro User Group News
by Randy Unruh
LAST MEETING
The last meeting was a PowerBuilder dog and pony show that turned into a mini-training session. PowerSoft is genuinely interested in attracted more developers from the Xbase community to use their tools and their willingness to give away so much free support points this out. As for the product itself, it is a very object based enviomment that lends itself well to increased productivity. As mentioned last month, it is very popular in the corporate market. And, as everyone knows, that’s were the money’s at (Willy Sutton was wrong).
NEXT MEETING - FoxExpress
FoxExpress for Windows will be the subject of our next meeting. This is a new product which most of you will have not seen. True, we took a look at the FoxExpress for DOS last year but the Windows product promises lots of new functionality. As usual, a door prize and product at reduced prices will be available. JUNE MEETING - dBASE for WINDOWS Borland is coming to show what they hope will be the newly released dBASE for Windows. This will prove interesting for all Xbasers, as dBASE is the mother of all Xbase. It should also prove interesting for FoxPros and Clipperheads, as it will provide a look at the competition and will show how Xbase can become truly OOPs.

I recently attended a one day training function for dBW called the dBASE Spring Training. I’m under NDA, so I can’t comment specifically about dBW. However, some comments have been publicly made by Borland and I can comment on the comments.
“dBASE for Windows will be truly Object Oriented”.
This appears to be
very true. You can take a look at
(Con’t, page 5)
Inside this issue
Special Announcement - Page 3
From the Pen of Ken - Page 4
Hot Off the Wire - Page 7
FoxPro Certification - Page 7
Hot Tip - Page 9

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