The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

May 1994

Special Announcement...

An Evening With Les

July brings a very special guest to Southern California.

Les Pinter, author of numerous books on FoxPro techniques and programming/development strategies, 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 coordination with the Orange County MS FoxPro Developers 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 Tuesday” 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)

However, if you want to think further about client server directions here are some suggestions. A book called Client/Server Strategies by David Vaskevitch will give you an overview of that world. He provides a marvelous historical perspective on how we got to the current state of affairs and a reasonable path into the future. This is a book about architectures, strategies, and methodologies rather than products and programming. David is one of the current thought leaders at Microsoft so you will also get some good insight on where their emphasis will be placed. There don’t yet seem to be many books that talk about client server database applications, but try Karen Watterson’s book called Visual Basic Database Programming. This is a cut above most of the VB books, which talk mostly about GUI interfaces and event handling, and it will give you a light introduction to the kinds of things that are involved in client server database applications. And if you want to take a bigger step, there is a day long seminar on PowerBuilder and client server specifically oriented to Xbase devel

opers by our tnend from the past, Adam Green. Adam is one of the best teachers I have ever encountered, and he is one of the worlds leading Xbase gurus, so if anyone can help a FoxPro person understand what client server is all about, its Adam. The LA seminar is on June 20, the price is $249, and the phone number is (800) 946-3500.

The second half of the April meeting was lead by Martha Dudley, of Omega Systems in Irvine, who demonstrated their Versions software for managing software development work. Versions takes a different approach than their competitors such as PVCS. Their idea was to make version control easy enough to use so that people would actually do it on a regular basis, rather than build a very sophisticated and rich product that is so difficult to use that most people won’t. The trick was to see if the resulting easy-to-use product did enough to make it all worthwhile. From my observation at the meeting, and from the review in the April Data Based Advisor, they succeeded. Versions is built with a nicely designed Windows user interface and offers the kind of flexibility that would allow it to be effectively used in wide variety of development situations, and the price is in the range that will make it easy to add to your tool set. A nice product and an interesting presentation.

For an excellent discussion on a pertinent topic, read Alan Schwartz in the May issue of FoxPro Advisor. He tackles the problem of long delay times for screen painting that can significantly affect the users perception of speed in FoxPro Windows applications. He discusses the proper use of the Show Get command, and finishes with “GenScmx to the rescue” as part of the solution - Ken Levy strikes again. The May issue of FoxTalk also contains another GenScmx article, this one by Steven Black.

Announcements

The Canadian FoxPro Developers Conference called FoxTeach ‘94 is being held in Toronto on June 3 and 4. This one is oriented to developers, with speakers qualified to teach. The price is $359. You can get further information and register at (800) 265- 1362

The FoxPro Users Conference will be held again this year in Minneapolis from Sunday June 19 through June 21. This conference has become an annual event that features many of the same speakers and

(Con’t, page 4)

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