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 back-

ground 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 develop-

ment 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 architec-

ture. 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

Visit our WebSite at: http://www.lafox.org

February 2000

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.

In this issue

Levy Joins XMLFund

Page 3

Hot Tips

Page 4

and much more!