The LA Fox Developer Newsletter --

December 1998

From the Board...

New Membership Fee

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, transpor-

tation and/or lodging for any of our guest speakers who travel to

Los Angeles to speak to the group, as well as other miscella-

neous 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 - 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 -

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

(Con't, page 12)

Designing a Better

Visual FoxPro

[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

(Con't, page 6)

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