The LA Fox Developer

The LA Fox Develooer Newsletter

The L.A 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.

Harbor City, CA 90710

LA Fox Board of Directors

Chuck Williams, President

Barry Lee, Vice President/Newsletter Editor

Allen Garfein, Treasurer/Membership

LA Fox is the oldest FoxPro developer’s group in Southern Califomia.The newsletter contains regular columns and articles from other user groups.

2210 Wilshire Blvd. - #161

Santa Monica, CA 90403

OC FoxPro Developers Group

Larry McQuerrey (714)639-3318

The annual membership fee for the LA Fox

User Group, including subscription to The LA

Fox Developer Newsletter, is $45.

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

and managing test data and viewing the results.

A special treat at the August meeting was a visit by Alan Griver and Savannah Brentnall, who came to the meeting after teaching at the Flash Creative Management Visual FoxPro training session in downtown LA. Alan’s discussion of the imminent new version of Codebook was nothing short of visionary - it sounds like he and his co-authors at Flash have taken the earlier book to a higher plane. This will not be just another FoxPro book filled with programming tips and tricks, this is a book about methodology \emdash object oriented methodology in particular - and about cooperating applications built with Ole Automation, about client/server applications, and about analysis and design techniques. I’m sure the book will include many interesting tools and programming gems that will fill in cracks and provide useful extensions to the Microsoft product, but its real value is in providing a framework for development. The objective is to guide you through the development process, submerge the mundane mechanics of the language, and clear the interference of the programming environment so you can focus your creative energies on design to meet the particular business requirements for your application. Flash is closely aligned with Microsoft’s direction and with the Neon FoxExpress and MicroMega FoxFire

folks in a way that should make a major contribidion to the way we develop applications. Codebook should appear around the

end of September - and if we can catch him in town we can probably get Ken to talk more about it at some future meeting.

One of the classic books on software engineering has just been reissued and I recommend it as a thought provoking and entertaining exercise. “The Mythical Man-Month” was written by Fred Brooks to reflect his experiences in developing the OS/360 operating system, one of the largest software projects ever undertaken at the time. The title refers to his warning about trying to schedule software projects as if man-months were a completely flexible parameter, which leads to the famous Brooks Law - adding more manpower to a late project will always make it later.

The just published version is an anniversary edition containing the original material and four additional chapters of related material, including the authors evaluation of his earlier ideas in light of today’s technology. Your first reaction is probably something like - why would I want to read about a 25 year old mainframe operating system written by some old IBM guy. I think the answer is that this man had remarkable insights about the process and problems of software development which are still largely valid today and which can be applied to our own