The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

March 1996

The LA Fox Developer is the monthly newsletter of

the LA Fox Developers Group. The purpose is

information sharing among application developers

and users working with FoxPro.

LA Fox Address

LA Fox

Barry R. Lee

714/375-3300

P.O. Box 6624

Huntington Beach, CA 92615-6624

LA Fox Board of Directors

Barry R. Lee, President/Newsletter Editor

Bill Anderson, Vice President

Allen Garfein, Treasurer/Membership

Chuck Williams, President Emeritus

George Dvorak

Bill Seldon

Mike Cummings

Michael Meer

George Porter

LA Fox is the oldest FoxPro developer’s group in

Southern California. 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 9C 403

OC FoxPro Developers Group

Larry McQuerrey

714/639-3318

MembershiplSubscription

The annual membership fee for the LA Fox Devel-

opers Group, including subscription to The LA Fox

Developer Newsletter, is $45.

Disclaimer

Neither the LA Fox User Group, the XPro User

Group, the OC 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 consid-

ered, 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 informa-

tion or opinions. Brand names and product names

may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their

resnective owners

Out and About (Con’t from page 1)

Jim Thompson has been developing database programs for seventeen

years. He will demonstrate the framework he is using for developing VFP

applications today. He says VFP was too big for him to “master~’ this

soon. It was also too valuable not to begin using immediately. Accord-

ingly, he read the Visual Fox Forum voraciously and talked with early beta

testers to determine which aspects of VFP seem to offer the highest

reward/risk ratio to his clients. His framework trades off some of VFP’s

nicer features in return for robustness today. If a feature wasn’t reliable or

wasn’t well-understood by VFP Forum gurus, Jim didn’t use it.

Accordlingly, he thinks of it as a good “transition” framework. He is

confident it will help others transition to VFP, but warns that his perspective

should be viewed as that of the blind man who could describe the

elephant’s body, but knew nothing of its trunk.

Since We Last Met

PC Magazine Database Tips Wanted PC Magazine wants your

database tips’ They’re looking for useful functions, procedures, techniques,

undocumented tricks, gotchas and so on for Windows or DOS database

products. They pay $50 per tip and you get a special PC Magazine T-shirt.

In addition, you’ll be helping some of the more than I million PC Magazine

readers become more productive and knowledgeable.

Tips should be accompanied by a concise description of why it’s useful

and good and how it works. Send your submissions via email to

72241 .33©compuserve.com. You can also mail your submission on disk

to Solutions, PC Magazine, One Park Avenue, New York, NY 10016-5802.

Please send a printout along with the disk.

The format fOr an example submission follows:

- Sal

Dear Sal,

I needed a function to calculate age in Microsoft Access for a customer

analysis application. We wanted to know how many of our customers fit

into each of several age groups. Each customers date of birth is stored in

a table, so I came up with the function shown in Listing One to calculate

age in years. To use it you supply the date of birth as the start date and

today’s date as the end date.. ..[explanation]...

It

works by using the DateDiff function to. ..[explanationj.

tested the Age function using Access 2.0.

John Doe

123 America Street

Anytown, CA 12345-6789

(408) 555-1212

Compuserve: 12345,6789

Internet: JohnDoe@SOMEWHERE.COM

Listing One

FUNCTION Age( varStartDate, varEndDate)

Returns Age in years

(Con?. paqe 3)

Access 2.0

Page 2