The LA Fox Developer

A Newsletter for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California

May 1995

LA Fox President’s Column

by Chuck Williams

Tom Rettig

Our chain of good fortune continued in April, with

one of the FoxPro “gurus” as our meeting speake.

As a development leader with Ashton-Tate in the

early dBase Ill era, Tom was one of the pioneers

of the desktop database industry. As an indepen-

dent developer, he has been a strong FoxPro

advocate for many years, and has been tightly

coupled with Fox Software and with Microsoft.

His presentation covered the Visual FoxPro data-

base container with its myriad of new commands

and capabilities, and was structured around the

comprehensive document that accompanied his

Devcon session. He started with the idea that

working with a “real database” will be a big chal-

lenge. In the past, that statement would have

triggered my defensive explanation that FoxPro

was a real database, but I know what he means,

and coming from Tom its okay.

Tom is so conscientious about reacting to audi-

ence questions, that even with a good presenta-

tion structure and very high transmission rate, he

spent over three and a half hours covering the 16

page document. Good grief there is a lot to learn in

this area - Tom explained the ideas of database

container, primary and foreign keys, persistent

relations, referential and entity integrity, stored

procedures, triggers, datatypes, defaults, rules,

nulls, buffering, locking, indexes, and the new

design tools for creating and managing these

things - and even then we didn’t get enough about

his Extended Database Container class library. We

will have copies of the paper at the next user

meeting, but reading it without hearing Toms

(Con’t, page 2)

Out and About

by Barry R. Lee

LA Fox Continues Its “Mini-DevCon” Series

La Fox will be continuing the mini-DevCon series

begun two months ago with Ken Levy and last month

with Tom Rethg. The next three sessions will be as

follows:

May 9, 1995, 7:30 PM - George Goley. What can you

say about George that hasn’t already been said?

George is the founder of Micro Endeavors, Inc., the

world’s most successful FoxPro training and develop-

ment firm. He is the author of four database manage-

ment books, as well as a contributing editor to and

member of the Technical Advisory Board of Data

Based Advisor. His articles have appeared in DBA,

FoxTalk, Byte, and many other publications. His

benchmark tests are still in use by vendors and users

alike to determine the relative performance of PC

databases. George has presented at all six US

DevCons, where his performance sessions are stand-

ing room only. [Please note the change in schedule

for this veiy special meeting.]

June 21, 1995, 7:30 PM - John Miller. John is past

President and current Vice-President of the Orange

County FoxPro Developers Group, as well as being

one of the featured speakers at the last DevCon, the

1994 FoxPro Users Conference in Minneapolis, and

(Con’t, page 3)

Inside this Issue..... FoxPro Q&A

Candy Machine Interfaces

Getting RAD with Application Frameworks

Hot Tip

Page 4

Page 5

Page 7

Page 8

TheMay meeting of LA Fox will be held on May 9,

1995, at 7:30 PM at our regular meeting place (the

Torrance Airport, 3301 Airport Drive, in Torrance).

For details on how to get there, see the map on the

back page.