The LA Fox Develooer Newsletter

July 1995

The L.A Fox Developer is the monthly newslet-

ter of the LA Fox User Group. The purpose is

information sharing among application develop-

ers and users working with FoxPro.

LA Fox Address:

LA Fox User Group

Chuck Williams (310) 539-9439

977 Ashbndge Lane

Harbor City, CA 90710

LA Fox Board of Directors

Chuck Williams, President

Barry Lee, Vice President/Newsletter Editor

Allen Garfein, Treasurer/Membership

George Dvorak

Bill Seldon

Mike Cummings

Bill Anderson

LA Fox is the oldest FoxPro developer’s

group in Southern Califomia.The newsletter

contains regular columns and articles from

other user groups.

XPro User Group

Randy UnrUh

(310) 399-9159

2210 Wilshire Blvd. - #161

Santa Monica, CA 90403

OC FoxPro Developers Group

Larry McQuerrey

(714)639-3313

Subscriptions

The annual membership fee for the LA Fox

User Group, including subscription to The LA

Fox Developer Newsletter, is $45.

Disclaimer

Neither the LA Fox User Group, the XPro User

Group, the OC MS FoxPro Developers Group,

their officers or board of directors or their

members make any express or implied warran-

ties of any kind with regard to any information

disseminated, including, but not limited to,

warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a

particular purpose.

Opinions provided by newsletter articles, or by

speakers, members, or guests who address the

meetings, are individual opinions only, and do

not necessarily represent the opinions of the

group. All opinions and information should be

carefully considered, and the group is not liable

for any incident or consequential damages in

connection with, or arising out of, the furnishing

or use of any information or opinions. Brand

names and product names may be trademarks

or registered trademarks of their respective

owners.

LA Fox President’s Column (Con't from page 1)

John underscored the idea that it will be quite a while before the

FoxPro community absorbs the newness of Visual FoxPro and

turns it to full advantage in client applications. The best advice

seems to be to get started now by reading about the object

oriented ideas, the database container ideas, the OLE ideas,

and the event model, and then start experimenting to get the

feel of the tools before you tackle a sizable client application

where results, quality, performance, schedule, and man-hours

count. Don’t expect the “framework” and “generator” products to

be ready very soon - the good ones are based on experience

and nobody has much experience yet. Maybe one of those

interim conversion jobs isn’t so bad after all - it can buy you time

while you climb this newest learning curve.

Our appreciation to John for driving the hour and a half to get to

our meeting after just getting home from a month on the road

doing FoxPro training sessions. Thanks, John.

dDAY Fair

Well, the Valley West group did it again, another excellent dDAY

fair. A full Saturday of good speakers and demos with key

people from Microsoft and Boiland as well as many thought

leaders from the FoxPro community, including Ken Levy from

Flash Creative Management Tom Rettig from his own company.

Alan Schwartz from Micromega, and Mike Feltman all the way

from Neon Software in Toledo.

I’m really glad I didn’t pass up Ken’s Object-Oriented Program-

ming presentation on the basis that I had heard him talk and

heard the topic many times before. This time he used an innova-

tive presentation technique based on FoxPro itself instead of

PowerPoint, and was able to smoothly weave the working code

examples into the story. He walked through the standard litany

of ideas about classes, objects, events, messages, encapsula-

tion, inheritance, and polymorphism, but it seemed clearer and

more pertinent with his technique - always expect something

extraordinary from Ken.

Alan Schwartz is one of my favorite FoxPro speakers and writers

and he presented one session on using the FoxPro Form De-

signer and another on Ad Hoc Reports. As the author of

FoxFire!, the very successful third party report writer, he is well-

qualified to extend from that base to his larger ideas about a

“Managed Query Environment” which would be much more

useful than today’s products. The objective is a tool that allows

an end-user to play around freely and investigate data with

much more flexibility than today’s rather rigid tools support. His

tool would be obvious enough to invite queries on impulse, fast

(Con't page 9)

Page 2