The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

December 1995

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 Finan-

cial 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 visual-

ize program flow almost immediately.

For the most part, I found Xilights to be very accu-

rate 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 consid-

ers MODIF COMMAN to be synonymous with

MODIFY COMMAND, while Xilights fails to identify

MODIF COMMAN as a keyword.

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.

It Can’t Get Any Easier.......

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 discov-

ered, 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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