The LA Fox Develoner Newsletter

VFP - Now What? (Con't from page 3)

3. Open up the Tools, Options dialog and set your

default directory. I set mine to the root of my devel-

opment directory. Then, in the GOFOXGO program

that is run from COMMANDDO ... in the

CONFIG.FPWfile, I run a menu that displays all of

the applications I’m currently working on. (You can

create your own menu just be creating a single

menu option, and then marking the “Append” option

so that this menu is added to the existing system

menu.)

Each menu option sets the default directory (and

any other appropriate settings) for that application.

4. Open up all of the toolbars. (You can use the

View, Toolbars menu option, or you can right click in

the grey area next to the Standard toolbar to bring

up a menu that offers you all of the available

toolbars.)

There are eleven, and if you’re running on a 640 x

480 monitor, you’ll have about 2 inches of usuable

screen space once you’re done. Less if you feel

adventurous and try the Large Icons checkbox in

the Toolbar dialog.

5. Check out the samples in the

SAM PLES\CONTROLS directory underneath VFP.

These are ‘way cool’ and will help you out a lot in

determining how to do do various things with the

various controls.

6. Ignore the sample application, TasTradens, that

ships with Visual FoxPro. It’s really cornplex and

could be better documented. It’s a great showcase

for demonstrating what can be done with Visual

FoxPro but there are better tools for learning how to

do it.

If you decide you’re not scared to dig into

TasTraders, I can only echo Geena Davis: Be

afraid. Be very afraid.

7. Copy all of the tables in an existing 2.6 app to a

new directory and then open them up and mess

with them (i.e. create databases, modify the struc-

ture, and so on) in VFP. Let me repeat that: COPY

THEM. Put them in a NEW DIRECTORY.

In Visual FoxPro, tables can belong to a database, or

they can be “free.” These both have the same struc-

ture, and this structure is not compatible with earlier

versions of FoxPro. One main difference is that the

header is different - it contains an extra 130-some

bytes that is used to identify which database a table

belongs to (free tables leave this space emtpy.) The

table structure in a Visual FoxPro table can be differ-

ent as well - there are more data types, including

NULL, which can’t be read by older versions.

As a result, when you add a 2.x table to a Visual

FoxPro database, the table will be converted to 3.0

structure and then be unreadable in FoxPro 2.x (or

by other programs that expect a 2.x DBF file struc-

ture.)

You can use the COPY TO xxx TYPE FOX2X to

create a 2.x DBF from a Visual FoxPro table.

8. If you bought the Professional Edition, install the

Class Browser and use it. A number of developers

keep it up on their VFP work surface along with the

Command Window.

9.Buy extra tools. Instead of trying to invent every-

thing yourself, why not take advantage of the enor-

mous.amount of time that others have put into Visual

FoxPro development already, and boost yourself

from their shoulders.

By the way, I was only kidding about encapsulation

referring to a message on a bottle cap. You knew

that, didn’t you?

[Ed. Note: Whil Hentzen is President of Hentzen-

werke Corp., and is a strong participant in the Fox-

Forum and FoxGang on CompuServe, as well as

producing FoxZen, a set of data-centric utilities and

“The Ultimate FoxPro Reference”, a free-ware guide

to products and services for the FoxPro market. His

new book, Programming Visual FoxPro 3.0, has met

with high praise from other authors within the FoxPro

community. He’s also working on his first fiction

book, Will Aliens Ever Forgive Us for Disco? He can

be reached on C'Serve at 70651,2270.]

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