The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

June 1999

Palm Springs DevCon Report

The Keynote for DevCon was highlighted with a demo of the

next version of Visual FoxPro. There is no release date. Here’s

a summary of some of what was shown:

- Code name is Sedona

- Flat toolbars (like Word, Excel)

- Command, Data Session, and other windows are dockable —

and can dock to each other. Randy Brown showed how the

Command and Data Session windows can be docked together.

- The debugger windows can be docked into a page-frame like

Window with tabs at the bottom

- The editor now has a bar on the left-hand side. Just click on

the bar and set a break point on that line of code

- Set bookmarks in the editor

Highlight a word in the editor, then press a hotkey to find the

next instance of the word

- View whitespace (you can see where spaces, tabs, and

paragraphs are at) in the editor

- Hyperlinks in comments

- Modified file indicator in the title bar for the window

- Many of the features of the COB editor extensions have been

included, including change case, command completion, etc.

This is configurable.

- To edit a page on a page frame, you don’t have to right-click

and select Edit. There is a keypress to do this now.

- Close parenthesis. You don’t need to count the number of

parns needed to close a statement. Visual FoxPro will tell you

how many you need.

- Timeout added parameter added to MESSAGEBOX

And the biggest thing.. .that got a huge cheer•

lntellisense, but done better. For example, you can type USE

and a list of the most recently used tables is diaplayed, or a list

of the tables in the DBC. It will also read the type libraries of

other objects and work with them too.

Also, forgot to mention:

Robert Green of MS said there will be no VFP6.5. The latest

Visual Studio SP3 not only fixes many bugs, including

C0000005 and printer driver bugs, but also sneaks in a good

number of new features (which most of you should already know

about) which is really a no-no in a Service Pack. I guess

technically speaking these new features could have made 6.0

into a 6.1, but they like to use the Service Pack mode at MS

now.

Craig Berntson

Microsoft FoxPro MVP

Salt Lake City Fox User Group

How to Avoid the “Cannot Quit

Visual FoxPro” Message

Ever tried to close your application, only to be told you can’t?

Here’s the story.

You’ve developed your application and handed itto the user.

Everything is fine. Then you get a phone call. The user tried to

close the app, but all that happened was that a message

appeared: “Cannot quit Visual FoxPro” (see Figure 1). Why?

Because the application is still in an event loop.

Figure 1: The dreaded Cannot Quit message

Somewhere in the app’s controlling logic, you have code that

looks like this:

DO MainMenu.MPR

READ EVENTS

Once the program has been put in an event loop (which is what

READ EVENTS does), you won’t be able to close down until

you have exited the event loop. You do that with the CLEAR

EVENTS command. You would normally execute CLEAR

EVENTS whenever the user signals that they want to close the

application — in the Exit command from the File menu, for

example.

But what if the user tries to close the application by clicking on

the Close box in the title bar? Or by shutting down Windows

itself while the application is still running? In those cases, the

program won’t have had an opportunity to execute CLEAR

EVENT. The event loop is still active, so the Cannot Quit

message appears.

To avoid this, use the ON SHUTDOWN command. This works in

the same way as VFP’s other “On” commands, such as ON

ERROR, in that it specifies an action which is to be taken when

a certain event occurs. In this case, the event is any attempt to

close the application, by whatever means.

So all you have to do is execute ON SHUTDOWN CLEAR

EVENTS. You do this near the beginning of the program — in

any case before the READ EVENTS. Once you have done that,

the user should never again see the Cannot Quit message.

When the user hits the Close box in the title bar, the program

will execute the ON SHUTDOWN code, which in turn will exit

(Con’t, page 4)

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