HackCX Professional Reviewed!

Technical Editor Andrew MacNeill reviews HackCX Professional in the January 2006 issue of Advisor Guide to Microsoft Visual FoxPro (formerly known as FoxPro Advisor). The article is titled "Tools for Forms and Classes in Visual FoxPro."

Subscribers to the magazine can read the article online before it is delivered to you via snail mail. You can find it on the new Advisor link: http://MSVFP.AdvisorGuide.com. Andrew writes:

"HackCX might have been written to deal with the most common type of "hack" developers need to make when browsing a form or a class -- changing of the name -- but that's not all it does. Click on the Properties tab and you can review or change the settings for each object. Click the Methods tab and you can review the actual code. Perhaps most importantly, HackCX also brings sense to all those reserved fields you saw in figure 1. Click the Reserved tab and each field is labeled with its actual purpose. If you view a class library with HackCX, you'll see that Reserved7 field is where the description of the class is stored and Reserved3 contains a list of all the custom properties and methods."

And goes on to say:

"How valuable you'll find HackCX really depends on the type of development you do. It isn't expensive ($50 per developer license) but if you build applications using frameworks and rarely spend time cleaning up or refactoring code, then it may not be something you need. But the moment you need to re-define a class or make changes under the hood, you'll wonder how you never lived without it."

Heck, even people who develop with frameworks will find this tool valuable. In fact, most of the HackCX customers use one of the many commercial or their own custom frameworks. One customer wrote me about how he used HackCX to transition between frameworks.

Andrew, thanks for saying such nice things about our developer tool and informing the community about HackCX.