Software Metrics (Con't from page 7)

all index tags, and ON KEY LABEL events. It then allows the developer to document all of these items, perform application wide analysis of components, export tables for reindexing and on-line help, and also print technical documentation.

I hope these two techniques discussed above, help developers in realizing what must be done in order to provide near defect free software. The field of software metrics is far more involved than what is presented here. But I hope this has at least made more people aware of the topic and what it can do for us as developers. Without some hard numbers to back up the normal testing procedure, something is bound to be missed.

I highly recommend the following books for people interested in reading more about this topic:

mer’, Ed Yourdon,

Yourdon Press, 1993

ment”, Mike Dyer, Wiley & Sons

If you have any problems, or would like to discuss

these issues further, please contact me at SHL

[SHL SystemHouse is one of the worlds largest systems integration companies in North America.]

Out and About (Con? from page 4) create jobs, and the place with the best trained, most entrepreneurial work force.”

No matter what your political views, if you agree or not with Gingrich on other issues, this proposal could prove to be the key to unlocking at least some of the chains that keep consultants from prospering, or at least making a decent living, and others from entering the market.

Write to your representatives and urge them to support the provision in HR-9 (The Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act of 1995) that will help those who work in home offices. Hopefully, they deserve the same breaks as large corporations.

dBase for Windows (Con't from page 4) you the peace of mind that you haven’t left logic bombs in the middle of some rarely used branch of your program. It’s a feature we could use in FoxPro.

Visual FoxPro will require 12 or 16Mb of Ram to run acceptably. There are times that you just can’t get your clients to put 16 Mb in every workstation. dBase will let you develop Object Oriented, modeless, truly Windows applications in Xbase very easily, and only requires 8 Mb to run OK. (Do you remember when 64k was a lot of memory?)

Overall, dBase looks like a good product that would have been a smash hit 2 years ago, and a solid contender 1 year ago. Interestingly enough, Borland seems to know that dBase is just too late to market to get people to switch. Over and over again, the theme in Borland’s video was “The smartest upgrade for dBase users.” The video’s second theme was 7 million installed users (of dBase.) I hate to break the news to Borland, but I’ve talked with both developers who are still using dBase, and they are both taking a serious look at FoxPro.

With Visual FoxPro coming real soon now, dBase is still playing a catch-up game. Not all of Borland’s new developer tools are late to market, me-too products. Watch this space next month for a review of Borland’s hot new tool, Delphi.

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 either Chuck Williams

(72330,2326) or Barry Lee (72723,3422) on

Compuserve.

These articles can be on any FoxPro-related topic, whether it concerns a new technique you’ve discovered, 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.

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