Shedding Some Light

A friend of mine emailed me today asking for sources of what’s new in VFP from an end user’s perpective (as in user interface issues). He has not upgraded since VFP 6, and is finally persuaded by the reporting features in VFP 9 to make the jump. My answer was fairly simple: read the Help file. Unfortunately he does not have the Help file for 7 and 8. I also mentioned the What’s New books from Hentzenwerke.

So I spent some time reviewing the Help files and going through the What’s New sections and documenting user interface feature improvements and enhancements. Quite a list I sent…

VFP 7.0

1) Implements: hooking into events happening in other applications.
2) Icons on menus
3) Hot tracking command buttons
4) Easier row highlighting in Grids
5) Wordwrapping in grid headers

VFP 8.0

1) Wordwrapping ToolTipText and longer tips (bumped from 255 to 4095 characters)
2) Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End to move to top and bottom of grid
3) Updated Windows dialogs for open and save when running on Windows 2000 and XP.
4) Grid column autosizing (one or all, very similar to Excel).
5) Better control over the CommandButton position graphics
6) Tab orientation on pageframes (top, bottom, left or right)
7) Hyperlink support in text and editboxes.
XP Themes
9) Easier and more flexible image support (animated GIF files and other formats, rotation and flipping)
10) Docking forms
11) Grids as listboxes
12) Better graphic performance on Terminal Services and CITRIX
13) Change background color on CommandButtons
14) Images in grid column headers
15) Suppressing the data related messages in StatusBar
16) Hiding columns in grid (not just taking the width to zero
17) Support for XP style icons

VFP 9.0

1) Field Tips in grid and BROWSE
2) Anchoring – far less need to handle code in the form resize event
3) Checkboxes and Option groups support wordwrapping
4) Better image/text alignment on CommandButtons
5) You can hide captions on CommandButtons, OptionGroups, and CheckBoxes (allowing for hotkeys to be supported without text)
6) Grids support Rushmore which makes them faster to surf
7) Label rotation
Better Theme backgrounding for labels
9) Toolbars can show and hide separator objects
10) Textbox controls have autocomplete feature available (like Internet Explorer address bar)
11) Updated InputMask/Format for controls
12) Reports – much better previewer, more control and events
13) Better printer dialogs for setting printer properties SYS(1037)
14) DisplayOrientation if users have TabletPC
15) Windows EventBinding so your apps can respond to events in the Operating System

Now I might have missed some things. If I have, pass them along in the comments and I will forward them to my friend. What are your favorites?