The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

May 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)

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 data-

base 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 pre-

sentation.

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 percep-

tion 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)

Page 3