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The LA Fox Developer Newsletter
May 1995
The LA Fox Developer is the monthly newsletter 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 Ashbridge 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 developers 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)639-3311
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.
LA Fox President’s Column (Con't from page 1 comments won’t be nearly as informative or as much fun.

Although the focus was database features, he touched on a wide variety of other topics. In particular, he had great praise for the FoxPro development team at Microsoft - they really listen carefully to the development community and then actually do something with the ideas - a brilliant implementation of SQL features married with the old dbf structure - the team includes some of the strongest designers at Microsoft - they have done a magnificent job on documentation.

This session had the same wonderful characteristics as last months meeting with Ken Levy - a very high level of expertise, a very high level of enthusiasm, and lots of laughs. Our thanks to Tom for a good show.
Industry Information
The May issue of DBMS magazine has several articles of particular interest. Tom Spitzer of SBT Accounting Systems does a better job than most at putting Visual FoxPro into per spective. He highlights the visual design environment, the 00 development environment, the power of the database container, and the stronger support for client\server systems. These are becoming familiar ideas as we get more exposure through our user group sessions and developer conferences, but they are expressed very clearly and concisely in Tom’s article. He ob serves that VFP “represents the complete assimilation of FoxPro into Microsoft’s visual development toolset” and “marks a significant departure from FoxPro 2.6 as well as from other Xbase dialects”. In the database area he notes that the VFP approach to balancing performance and integrity “seems like a surprising breakthrough”. He cites Tom Rettig’s EDC class library as the first example of how to take advantage of the extensibility offered by the database container. He foresees a significant add-on market for custom controls and reusable components for data inquiry and administration. He suggests that because VFP introduces so many new tools and techniques, it will require a large amount of “retooling” in the development community. On the other hand, the new level of capability in VFP, coupled with the evolution of Windows into a 32 bit operating system, makes FoxPro “a tool worth considering for large scale applications”. There is much food for thought in this article - it’s worth a read and some further discussion.

In the same issue is David Kalman’s interview with David Vaskevitch, Microsoft’s Director of Enterprise Computing. This is not about FoxPro or database development techniques, but gives a high level strategic overview of how Microsoft is thinking in this area. It leaves no doubt about the fact that Microsoft has a very comprehensive and ambitious long term plan for address (Con’t, page 3)
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