DAFUG: Collections

Last Thursday Mike Feltman of F1 Technologies presented his new session on Collections to the Detroit Area Fox User Group. Mike is putting this session together for the 2008 conference season and wanted to rehearse it to get some feedback before presenting it at conferences this year.

This session was excellent! Mike talked about collections, some advantages and disadvantages, how they work, how they compare to arrays, and then went in and demonstrated some code. Mike has put together a really cool set of utilities using collections based on his work with JavaScript over the last year. These utilities show the power of collections and are worth the price of admission to his session alone.

I rarely use the Collection class in Visual FoxPro, primarily because they are more difficult to debug than arrays. I use arrays for the same thing I can use a Collection. After seeing Mike's session I likely will use the Collection class more. Another thing Mike showed is how you can return an array property from a method in class code. This is something I either knew and forgot, or learned last Thursday.

Great session Mike! I know Mike is showing this session in Grand Rapids on May 10th, and anticipate this session will be selected by conference organizers too.