The LA Fox Developer

A Newsletter for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California

July 1995

LA Fox President’s Column

by Chuck Williams

John Miller

Our sequence of Devcon speakers continued this

month as John Miller talked about migrating a 2.6

application to Visual FoxPro. His opening message

was that migration and conversion are not easy

processes when the paradigm shifts as much as it

has in VFP, but there are some valid reasons for

wanting to do so. These include improving data

integrity using the database container capability,

moving the application to a client/server environ-

ment, extending the application with OLE automa-

tion, changing attributes at run-time, or taking

advantage of improved screen objects such as

grids and combo boxes.

He described three different approaches - an

incremental method that lets you distribute the 2.6

app as a 3.0 app - a full functional and visual

conversion using the built-in conversion tools - and

a full rewrite using 3.0 techniques throughout. The

first has the advantage of being doable in a few

days time frame - the second has the advantage of

some Microsoft tools to help you, but the tradeoff

is added complexity and the corresponding risk of

ending up with a huge kludge because of the

mixture of 2.6 and 3.0 constructs. The preferred

method is rewrite, or more appropriately redesign,

to take advantage of VFP strengths. This obvi-

ously takes much longer and has to be preceded

by a learning curve, but for a significant application

the results may warrant the cost. He pointed out

that there really isn’t any definitive performance

information yet - no reason to expect a great leap

forward, but on the other hand no reason to be

concerned about a major slowdown.

(Con’t page 2)

Out and About

by Barry R. Lee

LA Fox Concludes Its “Mini-DevCon” Series

La Fox will be concluding the mini-DevCon series

begun four months ago with Ken Levy, Tom Rettig,

George Goley, and John Miller, with a presentation by

Voysys. The next four sessions will be as follows:

July 17, 1995, 7:30 PM - Voysys. Mike Seto, from

Voysys, will demonstrating his company’s wares.

However, this is a sales pitch. One of the more

popular exhibitors at DevCon, this company’s products

provide functions to answer the phone, gather touch

tone digits as menu options, the ability to “speak”

numeric and date data to users who call in, and to

accept numeric input for table updates. It’s an interac-

tive voice response (IVR) toolkit and it’s done in

FoxPro. We’ll probably get a peek at the code behind

this technology, so don’t miss this one.

These past meetings have provided a rare opportunity

to see these people when they’re not surrounded by

hundreds of people clamoring for their expertise. It’s

like comparing a sold-out stadium concert with the

intimacy of a small night club.

These people have joined a list of speakers who have

(Con’t page 3)

In this issue

More GENSCRNX

VFP Releases to Production

Timeout With Pablo

Page 4

Page 5

Page 7

The July meeting of LA Fox will be held on July 17,

1995, at 7:30 PM at our regular meeting place (the

Torrance Airport, 3301 Airport Drive, in Torrance).

For details on how to get there, see the map on the

back page.