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The LA Fox Developer Newsletter
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June
1995
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The LA Fox Developer
is
the
monthly
newslet
ter of the LA Fox User Group. The
purpose
is information sharing among application developers 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 Setdon
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
2210
Wilshire Blvd.
-
#161
Santa Monica, CA 90403
OC FoxPro Developers Group
Subscriptions
The annual
membership
fee for the LA Fox
User Group, including subscription to The
LA
Fox
Developer
Newsletter,
is
$45.
Disclaimer
Neither the LA Fox User Group, the XPro User Group, the OC MS FoxPro Developers Group, their officers or board of directors or their members make any express or implied warranties of any kind with
regard
to any information disseminated,
Including, but
not
limited
to, warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a
particular purpose.
Opinions provided
by newsletter articles, or by
speakers, members,
or guests
who address
the meetings,
are
individual opinions only, and do not necessarily
represent
the opinions of the group. All opinions and information should be carefully
considered,
and the group is not liable
for
any
incident or consequential damages in connection
with, or arising
out
of, the furnishing or use of any information or opinions. Brand names and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
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LA Fox President’s Column
(Con't
from
page 1)
contains elements that enable and encourage a radical shift in application design
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not just code refinements and tool refinements but things that will change your design a lot. For example, the new event model remo$s the pain from creating a multiple- window, fully event-driven ilser interface, brings it into the range of normal design choices, rather than a heavily coded, elaborate and fragile construct, and even offers flexibility to modify it at
run
time. He noted that while interface development prowess in FoxPro 2.6 required deep knowledge of a small number of constructs, Visual FoxPro will reward a different
expertise,
namely broader knowledge of the enormous number of built-in events, properties, and methods and the way they interact.
One of the more interesting discussions
centered
on the object oriented features of Visual FoxPro. He notes the reason to use class libraries is that they are (or should be) stable, reliable, and performant
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which means that they have been carefully designed and implemented to make best use of the underlying language, and are well tested and shaken down through several implementation cycles
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all of which requires large efforts spread over time, which no one will have had a
chance
to do until VFP has been in the field for quite a while. Furthermore, to use a class library means learning another large set of detailed items over and above the already huge new set of FoxPro commands, functions, events, properties, methods, etc. His bottom line advice in this area was
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don’t start off with Visual FoxPro by trying to create a set of “wonder classes” or by buying a third party class library. Instead, first build a few applications that actually work and solve real user problems. Then after you have a feel for the strengths and weaknesses of the native language and tools, you can move into object-oriented mode by generalizing your code into classes or adopting a third party library.
George is well noted for his work with performance measurements, but at this stage in the beta cycle, the product has not yet been subjected to rigorous benchmarks. His opinion, based on design considerations and limited observation
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for SQL queries containing joins it will
run
much faster, for data files below 10k records it is probably a
little
faster than the current version, and for large data files it is probably somewhat slower, but the differences will not be major.
In keeping
with
the idea that VFP is so rich that everyone will have a list of 30 or 40 "single most important things”, George believes that the grid object in Visual FoxPro is not only far superior to the FoxPro Browse construct, but is the best in any of Microsoft’s development products.
George considers this the biggest product change he has ever
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