The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

May 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 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 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

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 signifi-

cant 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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