The LA Fox DeveloDer Newsletter

April 1995

The LA Fox Developer is the monthly newslet-

ter of the LA Fox User Group. The purpose is

information sharing among application develop-

ers 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 warran-

ties 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 devel-

opment 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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