The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

December 1995

Book

Review on

Programming Visual

FoxPro 3.0

by Tom Breay

A book by Whil Hentzen

Published by Ziff-Davis Press

Price $39.95 (includes diskette)

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 home-

town 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 accom-

plish 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 Func-

tional specifications.

Whether you are a

novice or a seasoned Fox

(Con't, page 9)

ToolTips...

Xilights

- Color Coded Editor

for Foxpro

by Jim Slater

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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