The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

December 1995

From the Pen of Ken...

Ken Levy Leaves Flash

Re: Ken Levy changes jobs

To : All

I have decided to leave Flash and pursue working primarily with the FoxPro team at Microsoft. The type of work for me leads me to spend more time in Redmond than in New Jersey, and my experience at Flash was fun and rewarding, and my continued relationship with Flash and it’s employees will remain. This transition has no relationship with any details within Flash, but rather a step required for me to take in order to spend more time doing what the type of work which best fits me.

I will not be a Microsoft employee, so will not be speaking for or represent Microsoft. While my activities will be under NDA, I will still be present as an MVP FoxPro forum member. The only difference that should appear in my public presents in the FoxPro forums on CompuServe will be the fact that the great [FLASH] logo will not appear after my name. <s> Instead, it will just be my name by itself, representing myself. I will continue to field questions which I have answers to when appropriate, but I encourage messages to be posted to All, primarily in the 3rd party products section if its related to utilities, and where others besides myself may also respond.

All comments and questions involving Flash should be directed to someone at Flash, and all comments and questions involving Microsoft and/or it’s products should be directed at Microsoft, not myself.

As for utilities, such as those like SuperCls toolbar for VFP. I will continue to upgrade and re-post them on occasion. If/when I create other related tools/ utilities, I may post them as public domain as well.

Hot Tips

Tips for Santa

by Nelson M. Johnson, CCP

some OT your programs may require “heads aown” data entry; the user will have their face buried in a form while they are doing data entry and looking back and forth between screen and form is very inconvenient. You may also want the data entry operator to use upper and lower case while entering names, and if they are not careful, you may end up going back to fix a bunch of data. Here is a simple funtion that returns a picture clause that will capitalize the first letter in the field. You call CapFirstO and pass the field you are using as the parameter:

Note: You will need “#ITSEXPRESSION ~" in the screen setup code and the Format... for a field should look somthing like “—CAPFIRST(FNAME)”.

Have you ever built a project and you get a dialog that says Fox can’t find a certain file and gives you the option to locate it? As it turns out, someone else changed the name of the function in question to conform to the naming convention, and your project didn’t get the update. Now you have the daunting task of trying to locate where in the project the function is referenced. Sure, you can use FoxDoc if you are willing to go through the setup options, wait for it to generate a result and then filter through the reports to get the one thing you need. I found a quicker way: I discovered that when you build a project, a symbol table from the compiler is stored in the SYMBOLS memo field of the project. You can type LIST TRIM(NAME) FOR “<thing to find>” $ SYMBOLS and this will show you all the places in your code the compiler finds uses of <thing to find>. Be sure to use upper case in <thing to find>. Here is a program that parses out the symbol table to make your searches easier:

(Con’t, page 7)

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