The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

June 1995

The LA 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 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

Randy Unruh

(310) 399-9159

2210 Wilshire Blvd. - #161

Santa Monica, CA 90403

OC FoxPro Developers Group

Larry McQuerrey

(714)639-3318

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)

contains elements that enable and encourage a radical shift in

application design - not just code refinements and tool refine-

ments 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 - which means that they have been carefully de-

signed and implemented to make best use of the underlying

language, and are well tested and shaken down through several

implementation cycles - 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 - 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 appli-

cations 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 measure-

ments, 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 - 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

(Con't, page 9)

Page 2