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The LA Fox Developer Newsletter
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December 1995
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Book Review
(Con? from page 3)
developer, this book, 37 Chapters and more than 800 pages, has something for all. Thanks Whil, for bringing your insights and pleasant manner of presenting to we who use this great product in our work life.
[Ed. Note: Tom has been in
the software design and development arena for 30 years in the Financial and Manufacturing arenas. He recently founded INFOLUTIONS and is specializing in business solutions using FoxPro. Tom can be reached at CompuSeive 72620,3250]
XiLig hts
(Con? from page
3)
You can change any of these colors by manually editing the .INI file, or with Xilights’ SETCOLOR command.
In actual use, Xilights is extremely fast; on a 486/66 it did not seem to slow down typing at all. It works on a letter-by-letter basis, which is fun to watch initially. For example, as you type the word “form”, the letters “fo” appear in black, then when you press “r” all 3 letters switch to purple (the default color for flow constructs), then finally when you press “m” the word changes to blue (keywords). When you open a complex program using MODI COMM or in the Form Designer, you are presented with a colorful program listing that helps you visualize program flow almost immediately.
For the most part, I found Xilights to be very accurate in identifying program components. In VFP, the phrase “this.backcolor” is displayed entirely in the keyword color while “this.myproperty” is split into the keyword color for “this” and the user text color for “myproperty”. It appears that the keyword list is imbedded into the .DLL; when I typed in a new command present in the current VFP beta but not in the released version, it was not identified as a keyword. This could be a potential problem down the road unless Xitech provides updates with each new VFP release. Also, keywords are identified only if you type the full command or the acceptable 4-letter abbreviation. For example, Foxpro considers MODIF COMMAN to be synonymous with MODIFY COMMAND, while Xilights fails to identify MODIF COMMAN as a keyword.
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Despite a couple of shortcomings, Xilights provides a much-needed enhancement for Foxpro developers. Best of all, you can try out a demo version for free for 21 days, if you don’t mind seeing a “Register Me”
screen pop up every 5 minutes. The demo version
XLGHTIO5.ZIP is available on Compuserve in the VFOX forum library 6 or FOXFORUM library 5.
Out and About
(Con’t
from page
2)
being published in the Rocky Mountain States, the Midwest,
or
the East Coast. These articles can then be accessed by other newsletter editors for inclusion
in
their respective newsletters. It works sort of like a chain letter, but serves a much more useful purpose, in that each group’s newsletters stay “fresh”. If you’ll notice, several articles in this newsletter are from other groups.
Michael Meer,
Microcomputer Engineering Setvices, LLC,
and LAIOC
Fox
member, has been unofficially “signed” by
Neon Software/FoxExpress
to develop the security generation module for their new visual product.
Elsewhere Rumor has
it that Microsoft and
NBC are negotiating a deal that could give Microsoft a 49% share in NBC. Microsoft has already expressed an interest in helping NBC develop a 24-hour news station and NBC has signed on to MSN.
We’ve come up with an easy way
to submit articles to the
LA Fox Developer Newsletter
one that has been overlooked for a long time.
You can submit your articles to Barry Lee at CIS# 72723,3422 on Compuserve.
These articles can be on any FoxPro-related
topic, whether it
concerns a new technique
you’ve discovered, a certain development technique you may favor over others, book reviews, etc.
The quality of this newsletter really
depends on the
members that support
it, not just read it.
And I think
we’d all be surprised by the useful information that could be circulated around the membership.
So.
How ‘bout it?
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