The LA Fox Developer

A Newsletter for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California September 1995

LA Fox President’s Column

by Chuck Williams

At the August meeting we reverted to the format of

many of last years meetings, where members

describe their own FoxPro applications. Bill Ander-

son and I gave a short description of the FoxPro

Mac application we are working on for Stanford

University. I lead off with a discussion about

requirements definition and testing, Bill gave a

demo of the running app showing menus, naviga-

tion, screen design, and report design, and we

followed with a question and answer session.

This a registration system that manages enroll-

ments for the Instructional Television Network,

supports publication of course catalogs and broad-

cast schedules, calculates fees for all students,

creates management deports arid financial reports,

and exports data to a Great Plains Dynamics

accounting system for custom invoice processing.

We showed samples of the diagramming tech-

niques used for reaching agreement with users

about requirements, and for documenting our

solution. Process diagrams show how data flows

from external sources through automated pro-

cesses to data stores and system outputs. Naviga-

tion diagrams relate menu options to the screens

and reports to show the dialog a user could follow

to accomplish a particular task. For example, the

report selection dialog showed how a user could

specify the query for a particular management

report.

We also discussed the importance of testing when

the application involves the client’s finances - in

this case the business rules for calculating bills

\emdash and showed the approach to creating

In this issue

Error Trapping

Where Does Code Go?

Terrific GUIs

Out and About

by Barry R. Lee

September 18, 1995, 7:30 PM - Les Pinter. Les is

well known in the FoxPro community for his knowledge

and his wit. He has published a long standing, regular

newsletter, The Pinter FoxPro Letter, is a regular

columnist for Pinnacle’s FoxTalk newsletter, and has

appeared in many other national publications and

conferences In this return to LA Fox, he’ll be speak-

ing to us about designing and building Class libraries in

VFP. This should be a fun meeting don’t miss it.

October 16, 1995, 7:30 PM - Savannah Brentnall.

Savannah Brentnall is an independent consultant

specializing in object orientation and is a founding

partner of the Visual Training Group, which specializes

in object technology training. Savannah and her

company have recently joined forces with Flash Cre-

ative Management to offer VTG’s two-day course on

object orientation to FoxPro audiences. She has

spoken at conferences and user groups around the

world and has programmed in Xbase since 1984.

It is only fitting that Savannah is speaking at Octo-

ber's meeting. It was just about two years ago, come

October, that she spoke on object orientation, at an LA

Fox meeting, and everyone thought, “Well, that’s nice

and everything, but how does it apply to me?” My,

how times have changed!

(Con't, page 7)

Page 3

Page 4

Page 6

and a whole lot more!

rhe February meeting of LA Fox will be held on

Sept. 18, 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.