The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

March 1996

Death of FoxPro (Con’t from page 1)

Contrary to a February 16 report in the publication “Information Week Online,” Microsoft will continue to develop, manufacture, and support Visual FoxPro. A Macintosh version of Visual FoxPro 3.0, the current generation of the product, is slated to ship this summer, and the Visual FoxPro team continues work on the next version.

b)In March, Application Developers Training Company (AppDev) and Microsoft Corporation will co-sponsor a new one- day seminar for developers around the U.S. and Canada highlighting how to make programming easier with the powerful new features of Visual FoxPro 3.0. If you’re a developer, power user, manager or independent consultant using FoxPro or an Xbase programming language, this seminar is for you. Call for information orto register in the U.S. or Canada: 1-800-295-1883. If you are interested in viewing additional information on AppDev, please check out the AppDev Web page. Outside the U.S or Canada, please contact your local subsidiary for training opportunities.

c)The alpha release of the WWW Search Page Wizard and the beta release of the VFP ODBC Driver 1.0 are now available. Check out the Visual FoxPro home page.

4. Active VRML

Active VRML is a modeling language for specifying interactive animation. An interactive animation is an event-driven animation where those events are defined by the animation’s author. Animation can be created from two- and three-dimensional geometries, two- and three-dimensional points, vectors, and transforms, as well as montages, colors, images, text, and sound. An example of an interactive animation is a solar system complete with planets that rotate about their axis and orbit the sun. The interactive aspects of this animation could include buttons which let the user move (in three dimensions) around the solar system and sounds which increase in volume as the user “approaches” a given planet or star. For a complete description of the modeling language as well as sample animation, please visit the Active VRML page in the Internet development toolbox.

5. MSDN Ships Pre-Release of Windows NT Workstation

4.0

A new premium release of the Development Platform has been shipped to Microsoft Developer Network Level 2 members. It contains:

- Windows NT Workstation version 4.0 P re-Release

- Win32 SDK

-Windows NT DDK

- BackOffice SDK 2.0 Pre-Release

Version 4.0 (also known as the Shell Update Release or SUR) integrates the Windows 95 shell with Windows NT. Those of you who want to port your applications from Windows 95 to Windows NT 4.0 should check out “To SUR, With Love: Important Stuff To Know About the Windows NT Shell Update Release” by Nancy Cluts to find out more about dealing with a couple of gotchas that have surfaced during early beta testing. The article can be found online in the Developer Network News.

6. Access95 Beta Exam has been Extended to 3.7.96 The Microsoft Access for Windows95 and the Microsoft Access

Windows API Calls

User Login ID’s - (FoxPro 2.x)

(Ed. Note: The following tips were submitted by the PAFUG editor Bob Timney for inclusion in Tips & Tricks...)

Editor’s note: This little gem has my vote for tip of the year! I have heard many speakers talk at seminars on the subject of getting user information straight from the network, and there have been some elaborate techniques to get this done. The most widely accepted technique of setting a DOS variable by the name of USER to the login id has been used in autoexec.bat files and by even more, setting this variable in the Novell login script unbeknownst to the user. BUT it was STILL just a DOS Environment variable... Wading through massive amounts of information on the Internet, I recently “overheard” Paul Russell offer this fantastic piece of code:

Date: Thu, 12 Oct 1995 From: “Paul Russell” <prussell@fox.nstn.ns.ca>

* Setup the Windows function

set library to foxtools

m.lnWNetGetUser = (RegFn("WNetGetUser","@C@|","|")

* Setup some placeholders

m.gcUserName = space(40)

m.lpUserLen = 40

* Retrieve the name, assigning a value if it wasn’t found if CaIIFn(m.lnWNetGetUser,

@gcUserName,

@IpUserLen) >= 0 and

m.lpUserLen> I and;

not empty(m.gcUserName)

m.gcUserName = left(m.gcUserName,m.IpUserLen-1) else

m.gcUserName = “UNKNOWN” endif

release IpUserLen m.gcUserlD = m.gcUserName

Paul notes success testing this in Win 3.1, Win 3.11, WFW, Windows ‘95, Novell and mentions that he hasn’t tested NT or Banyan, but because this is a standard Windows function, we assume it would work.

I have verified that it works on NT and will post when I have

tested it with Banyan (won’t be in time for press). And because

I was so excited, I also re-tested it on Novell!

My test was the following.

set library to foxtools

m.lnWNetGetUser = RegFn(”WNetGetUser”,”@C@l”,”l”)

m.gcUserName = SPACE(40)

m.IpUserLen = 40

=CallFn(m.lnWNetGetUser,@gcUserName,@IpUserLen)

WAIT WINDOW ALLTRIM(m.gcUserName)

Thanks Paul!

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