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The LA Fox DeveloDer Newsletter
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April 1995
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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
2210 Wilshire Blvd.
-
#161
Santa MOnica, CA 90403
OC FoxPro Developers Group
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
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