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The LA Fox
Developer
Newsletter
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December 1995
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I have always enjoyed
Whil Hentzen’s Cool Tools and numerous other articles in various FoxPro and related publications. When I saw he had written a book on Visual FoxPro “Programming for Visual FoxPro 3.0” I just had to have it. It was money well spent! In fact, I wish I would have had it some 18 months ago when I made the transition from too many years in the main frame world (Cobol, PIll, Assembler, Yech!!!) to FoxPro.
Whil does an excellent job explaining the inner working of the Fox language that applies to the 2.x versions as well. His treatment of the birth and history of the language (born and bred in the hometown of my pioneer great grand-parents, and across the river from my hometown, by the way) gives the reader a sound understanding of the purpose and growth of the language.
In a chapter by chapter basis, Whil lends insight into the language and its commands. Using a step by step process, and showing various ways to accomplish the objective, makes for easy reading and following along. His examples are practical and flow in a logical manner. I found his style of writing to be very pleasant and highly informative. This book shed a great deal of light on many areas within the Fox language as well as bridging that chasm that seems to lie between Visual 3.0 and the 2.x generation. Woven throughout the pages are Tips and Tricks that are sure to be of help to those of us who use FoxPro to earn a living.
The book is organized into 5 parts, Interactive Visual FoxPro, The Xbase Programming Paradigm, Visual FoxPro Tools, Building a Visual FoxPro Application, and Advanced Topics. An Appendix includes a sample Engagement letter and Functional specifications.
(Con't, page 9)
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ToolTips...
for Foxpro
When VFP appeared on the scene in July, many were surprised that it lacked a color-coded editor. Visual Basic and Dbase for Windows have had such a feature for a long time, so why not Foxpro? Xitech Inc. has come to the rescue with Xilights, a Foxpro .FLL library that adds color coding to the editor and command window. Both Foxpro 2.6 for Windows and Visual Foxpro are supported; there is no FP DOS version.
Installation is simple. Unzip the file, then copy the XIL_KRNL.DLL to your \WINDOWS\SYSTEM direc tory. Within Foxpro, type SET LIBRARY TO xilights.fll and it is installed. Interestingly, Xilights is “persistent” .FLL; it is not released when you type SET LIBRARY TO, unlike normal FLL’s. Instead, you must type CLEAR ALL followed by SET LIBRARY to remove it from memory. This is a convenient feature that means you will not have to reload Xilights each time your application issues a SET LIBRARY TO command.
Xilights provides separate colors for each of the following 8 components of Foxpro code:
1 User text
2 Foxpro keywords
3 String constants in quotes
4 Numeric constants
5 Flow constructs
6 Comments
7 Compiler directives (#DEFINE)
8 System variables LGENMENU)
The current settings are kept in the XILIGHTS.INI
file in your Windows directory in the form of keywords followed by an RGBO color number.
(Con’t, page 9)
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