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The LA Fox Developer Newsletter
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December 1998
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From the Board...
Structure Announced
from
The LA
Fox Board of Directors
As we approach the beginning of a new year, it’s time to begin thinking about our membership dues and what we can do to increase the quality of our meetings, the value of membership, and the funds in our treasury.
Annual dues to LA Fox are $48. These membership fees will become due and payable from
each member
of the group at the January meeting. This year(1998), The Board changed the past practice of renewing membership during the “anniversary” month of membership. If you won’t be able to attend the January meeting, and wish to remain a member-in-good- standing, you should mail your dues to Twila Miller, 1601 North Sepulveda Blvd. -#191, Manhattan Beach, CA, 90266. (The membership fees cover the cost of the meeting room at the Torrance Airport, the cost of publishing the newsletter, transportation and/or lodging for any of our guest speakers who travel to Los Angeles to speak to the group, as well as other miscellaneous expenses incurred in running the group. Having all of the dues payable on January 1st provides an advantage of being able to more effectively plan out the coming year.)
The membership period covers from January 1 to December31 of the current year.
If a person joins LA Fox after January 1, that person’s dues will be pro-rated based on when in the year the person joins. In other words, if a person joins in July of 1998, the amount of the dues would be 1/2 of regular membership, or $24. After that, the person’s dues would become payable on January 1 of the following year.
This coming year (1999), The Board has elected to offer a two- tier pricing structure to the membership. The $48 membership fee will now be known as the “Standard” Membership. The benefits of Standard Membership wilt remain what they have always been
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the monthly newsletter, the FoxCast, etc.
We are also offering a “Premium” Membership. Premium Membership to LA Fox will be $120 annually. Benefits included in the price of Premium Membership will be all of the Standard benefits, plus all of the articles (published in electronic form) from all of the past newsletters (approx. 5 year’s worth); you receive the current newsletters in both electronic form (PDFs
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Acrobat Reader will be included) and hardcopy; as well as other benefits we have been “tossing around”. Obviously, we’re doing this to put more money in the treasury, so that we may have more flexibility in planning speakers and activities for the group.
So the plan is for you to renew your membership at whatever
level you feel comfortable with. The Standard Membership has |
[An interview with John Rivard, lead developer on the Microsoft Visual FoxPro 6.0 team.)
With the release of Visual FoxPro 6.0 in
September, Microsoft
upgraded and improved its tool for building high-performance database applications. In this interview with MSDN Online, John Rivard, lead developer on the Microsoft Visual FoxPro team, explains the many changes that make Visual FoxPro 6.0 easier to use, more powerful, and up to date. Learn how this new member of the Visual Studio 6.0 tools suite improves developer productivity, maintains its reputation for speed, and supports front-end, middle-tier, and back-end development.
MSDN: What is your role on the Microsoft Visual FoxPro development team, and how long have you been with the team?
RIVARD: I’ve been with the team since the release of Visual FoxPro 3.0 several years ago.
I
was a lead for seyeral of our releases during that time. During the development of Visual FoxPro 6.0,
I
was dev lead for the whole team. Today my responsibilities are split between managing the development cycle and coding features and fixing bugs.
MSDN: What did you do before you joined the Visual FoxPro
•eam7
RIVARD: Iworked on Windows for Workgroups 3.1, Windows 95, and the Windows Networking Team here at Microsoft.
MSDN: So you had some experience in operating system
development before you joined the Visual FoxPro team. Let’s
discuss Visual FoxPro. The product seems to have an unusu
ally loyal following among the developers who use
it. Why is
that?
RIVARD: The question I always ask customers when I go to
developer conferences is,
"Why
do you use Visual FoxPro?” They
tell me their No. 1
reason is the database engine in Visual
FoxPro—specifically the speed of that engine. Developers
adopted that technology because it’s very easy to use and fast. With it, they know their solutions are going to have good performance.
The old style of FoxPro programming centered on the xBASE database language. When Microsoft released Visual FoxPro 3.0, it brought object-oriented programming to FoxPro. Since then, developers have taken to this wholeheartedly. They love
the OOP programming model. Most FoxPro developers are
heavily entrenched in that. With the OOP style in Visual FoxPro 6.0, developers can build very complex object models and classes that encapsulate all their functionality. Some developers I talk to tell me they don’t really even use the FoxPro database language directly. They’ve wrapped it
all
up in nice
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