ADO Jumpstart for Microsoft Visual FoxPro Developers

Patti

John V Petersen

[Ed. Note: Reprinted with the author’s full permission. This is

the beginning of a multi-part article.]

Summary: Provides Microsoft® Visual FoxPro® developers with an overview of ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO) and shows how to incorporate ADO into Visual FoxPro applications. Discusses the ADO object model and implementing Remote Data Services

(RDS).

Contents

Introduction

What are OLE DB and ADO?

Why Incorporate ADO into a Visual FoxPro Application?

ADO Object Model

Remote Data Services

Summary

Introduction

ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) is perhaps the most exciting new Microsoft technology in quite some time. Because ADO is concerned with data, this new technology is of particular interest to Microsoft Visual FoxPro developers. Of course, you may ask, “Why do I need ADO? Visual FoxPro already has a high-performance local data engine.” It’s a good question.

This paper provides the Visual FoxPro developer with a background of what ADO is and how to incorporate ADO into Visual FoxPro applications. After reading this paper, you should have enough information to readily answer the question: “Why do I need ADO?”

A Brief Word About ADO Events

One limitation of Visual FoxPro has been an inability to surface COM events. While Visual FoxPro can respond to events raised by ActiveX controls, objects created with the CreateObject function cannot. InVisual Basic®, COM Events are handled by using the With Events keyword. In Visual FoxPro, the new

(Con’t, page 5)

At LA Fox

February 21, 2000, 7:30 PM. Nicholas Duncan. Nicholas

has been around a long time and has played a major part in implementing several sophisticated apps. In this session, he’ll cover a wide range of topics from Y2K to his latest Internet PDF engine.

March 20, 2000,7:30 PM. Kevin McNeish. Kevin McNeish is President of Oak Leaf Enterprises - a company that specializes in object-oriented software, training and developer tools. He is the creator of The Mere Mortals Framework for Visual FoxPro - a robust tool for developing flexible and adaptable applications rapidly. Kevin mentors and trains many software development companies to build flexible, component-based applications that can easily scale from two-tier to n-tier and also be accessed via the Internet. He is a Microsoft-Certified Developer and has created many enterprise-wide applications for a wide variety of vertical markets using Visual FoxPro as the primary development tool. This session takes you beyond the basics of business objects into advanced topics of creating, distributing and using business objects in the real world. See how the new features of Visual FoxPro 6 Service Pack 3 can help you create business objects that can automatically adapt and scale to their environment; whether it’s a two-tier, three-tier or n-tier architecture. Learn how to overcome the inherent slowness of DCOM. Learn to create business objects with crisp boundaries and a well-balanced load of responsibilities. During this session you’ll see live examples of business objects at work in a variety of settings from the desktop to the Internet, serving up Visual FoxPro cursors, HTML, XML and ADO recordsets.

(Con’t, page 2)

The LA Fox Developer

A Newsletter for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California

Out and About

by Barry R. Lee

The October meeting of LA Fox will be held on Oct. 18, 1999, at 7:30 PM at our new meet ing place (NCR, 100 N. Sepulveda Blvd., El Segundo, CA). For details on how to get there, see the map on the back page.

and much more!