The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

June 1997

Ken Levy’s CIassX Seminar

by Pablo Fung

Sacramento Fox Users Group

Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office 97, Windows 97. These apps

have the User interface that are today’s and tomorrow’s user

interface standards. The Internet revolution is upon us, and

Web technologies have made computers more accessible to

end-users. They will be expecting to navigate through our

applications as easily as any web page.

To help us do that, Ken Levy kicked off his “VFP Web-centric

application development” tour right here in Sacramento and

showed us that we already have all the pieces needed to create

hypertext-based, browser like interfaces. There is no need to

wait for Windows 97 or Visual Foxpro 6. Also, Ken’s subclass

of the Web Browser control works without the need of a web

server.

Joining us in this new frontier were people from San Diego, Los

Angeles, the Bay Area, Davis, and Sacramento (of course!).

We all knew we had a tough day ahead of us, not only because

of Ken’s reputation for thinking and talking at a much higher

speed than most of us, but also because it was a lazy Sunday,

we had lost an hour of sleep due to daylight savings, and the

wind had stirred up allergies. The morning coffee, juice and

pastries helped a lot to kick us into gear.

Ken started by covering the basics of web construction: Static

HTML, dynamic web pages, ActiveX controls, VBScnpt, and

JavaScript. He also showed some of the tools used to build the

items for the above starting with “Visual” Notepad, TextPad,

Microsoft Word 97, and HTML Control Layout. He showed us

how to use VB 5 Control Creation Edition to build a control and

use it within Internet Explorer and Visual Foxpro. For those who

attended Devcon 95 in San Diego, and remembered seeing

Meng-Kuan Phua’s session on the grid control, where he

fascinated the audience with a grid within a grid, Ken recreated

that excitement by showing a web browser within a web

browser. Wow!!!

Lunch was extraordinary. Sally Wong picked the best hotel to

cater the lunch. The fajitas were very tasty and flavorful, the

salad was fresh and beautifully arranged, the fruit was fresh and

delightfully in season, and the drinks were plentiful. The flan

dessert looked almost too good to cut into, but that didn’t stop

Sally from starting with dessert first, while the rest of us lined up

at the buffet table. After a hearty lunch, the group was rounded

up outside near the water fountain, where after several tries,

Sally finally managed to set us up for a class photo.

The afternoon session flew very fast. As our brains started

slowing down and approaching overload, Ken picked up speed

and was on a roll. He showed us how he put everything to-

gether using a whole application development solution to build

(Con’t, page 9)

From

the Internet

VFUG Announcement

From: “Scot A. Becker” <scotb@vitus.com>

Organization: Virtual FoxPro User Group (VFUG)

To: “All VFUG Members” <scotb@vitus.com>

Subject: VFUG Announcement

This is an official Virtual FoxPro User Group (VFUG) Announce-

ment

Please excuse the intrusion, but we felt that this was an

announcement that all VFUG members should see. The VFUG

site is moving locations. Our request to change our domain

name, http://www.vfug.org, is in process. We have our lP

address listed in the press release below. Please remember

that this may not be fully functional in your area for the next

couple of days. If the domain name and IP address are not

working in your area, you can get a sneak peak of our site at

http://ntweb.dev-com.com/tomo. Please, keep all bookmarks

and/or any hyperlinks you may have set to the http:I/

www.vfug.org address.

Thanks,

Scot.

On May 31, 1997 the Virtual FoxPro User Group (VFUG) will

move to it’s new site. We will be leaving our “Fournier Transfor-

mation" site (http://www.transformation.com and be moving to

“The Developers Community” site (http://www.dev-com.com) and

plan to stay there indefinitely. In the process you will see many

changes and maybe a few bumps as we make our move and

set up our new home.

First of all we would like to thank Michel Fournier for creating

many of the web pages at our original site and for hosting

VFUG. Michel has put countless hours into developing and

maintaining the original VFUG site. Unfortunately in the move

we will be losing Michel as a VFUG officer. Michel’s site and

his time are being consumed by the tremendous success of

Foumier Transformation and it’s related web sites. This is why

we need to make a move and why we are losing Michel - Michel

is just too busy these days to support VFUG any longer. We

would like to take this opportunity to say “Thank You Michel!”

The remaining VFUG officers, Amon Gal-Oz, Scot Becker and

Tom O’Hare, want the over 5,000 current VFUG members to

know that with the move to the new VFUG site there will be

many changes taking place over the next few months. We have

been planning a great number of new features and have some

very good expansion ideas for VFUG. You may notice some

minor changes in the interface but we have kept the site pretty

well intact for now.

Developers Community is a hosting service dedicated to

supporting the needs of Professional Web developers. The Dev-

(Con’t, page 9)

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