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The LA Fox DeveloDer Newsletter
April 1995
The LA Fox Developer is the monthly newsletter of the LA Fox User Group. The purpose is information sharing among application developers and users working with FoxPro.
LA Fox Address:
LA Fox User Group
Chuck Williams (310) 539-9439
977 Ashbndge Lane
Harbor City, CA 90710
LA Fox Board of Directors
Chuck Williams, President
Barry Lee, Vice President/Newsletter Editor
Allen Garfein, Treasurer/Membership
George Dvorak
Bill Seldon
Mike Cummings
Bill Anderson
LA Fox is the oldest FoxPro developer’s group in Southern California.The newsletter contains regular columns and articles from other user groups.
XPro User Group
Randy Unruh
(310) 399-9159
2210 Wilshire Blvd. - #161
Santa MOnica, CA 90403
OC FoxPro Developers Group
Larry McQuarrey
(714
Subscriptions
The annual membership fee for the LA Fox
User Group, including subscription to The LA
Fox Developer Newsletter is $45.
Disclaimer
Neither the LA Fox User Group, the XPro User Group, the OC MS FoxPro Developers Group, their officers or board of directors or their members make any express or implied warranties of any kind with regard to any information disseminated, including, but not limited to, warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.

Opinions provided by newsletter artides, or by speakers, members, or guests who address the meetings, are individual opinions only, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the group. All opinions and information should be carefully considered, and the group is not liable for any incident or consequential damages in connection with, or arising out of, the furnishing or use of any information or opinions. Brand names and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
LA Fox President’s Column (Con't from page 1)
working with classes rather than writing code in prgs. His focus was the Class Browser as the primary tool for this kind of development approach, and he also touched on such things as the new Builders and OLE Automation. While VFP is bringing much sharper tools that increase the scope and complexity of the things we can do, they are two edged swords that can get us in trouble very quickly if we don’t learn how to use them well. Thank heaven for guys like Ken that can help us with this fun problem. “Oh yeah, I just want to show you one more cool thing
“- the session ran well past 11 pm and continued at Dennys.
Microsoft Tech Ed Conference
Several weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the Tech Ed conference in New Orleans. This is the same basic idea and format as our FoxPro Devcon, but on a larger scale 7500 people for a full five days and with a broader scope the full Microsoft product spectrum. My first positive reaction was to see that FoxPro was treated as part of the family rather than an orphan in fact, a FoxPro demo was used to illustrate one of the points in the opening keynote address by Roger Heinen about Microsoft’s strategy and future direction.

The vision they articulated is very broad and their objectives are very ambitious. Their focus is not on neat product features but on the idea of providing a complete set of tools and a strong framework ror large enierprise information systems. While we normally think of a dient\server system as the next step up from a single file server database system, they expand the idea to include many servers, and many different kinds of servers, distributed widely across many networks of different kinds. Their BackOffice suite of products is all based on Windows NT Server and indudes not only SQL Server for database service, but also Mail Server, for email service, Exchange Server for messaging service, SNA Server for communications service, and System Management Server.
They are moving their products forward vigorously in tune with the overall strategy, and while some of the individual products are not yet at the same level as the hype, the sessions and the demos make it dear that this is more than sales talk. They are serious about enterprise computing and the demos showing the interoperability of NT and the flexibility of SQL Server are very impressive. The power of the OLE automation idea is now coming closer to fruition with Excel leading the pack. A demo by a Solution Provider called Technomation was one of the best illustrations of the power of todays tools. They built a very broad and extremely flexible application framework based on object orientation and interprocess communication to provide access and integration of a wide variety of commercial off-the-shelf and custom software components for a real world global oil and gas
(Con't page 3)
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