Shedding Some Light

Finally coming up for some air today after a marathon of activity here at White Light World Headquarters. I added about 10 blog entry ideas to my Wiki over the last couple of weeks and have not had time to address any of them.

VFP 9 has many enhancements to the Property Sheet, but one I was using a lot this last week include a shortcut to the Edit Property/Method dialog. I was refactoring some classes for a builder framework I am extending (which will be detailed in a future article in Advisors Guide to Visual FoxPro). I was adding properties and methods, renaming them, changing descriptions, and moving them to different classes. Fun work.

One of the frustrating things to make these changes is to to pull the Edit Property/Methods dialog off the Form or Class menu. Once displayed you have to scroll down the list to find the property/method you want to change. What I rediscovered this week is you can call the dialog from the Property Sheet shortcut menu and it will actually position you on the PEM (property/event/method) in the dialog. What a time saver.

Unfortunately this is only available for custom property and methods you add to the form or class. Right-clicking on intrinsic PEM does not display the menu option. Bummer.

Now the dialog should become a MenuHit project on SednaX (hint, hint, hint {g}). The dialog should be modeless like Doug Hennig’s New Property/Method dialog. It should be resizable, remember its last size and position, and be dockable. It should be MemberData smart (making a change to the PEM in this dialog wipes out the MemberData details), the New Property and New Method buttons should call Doug’s dialog. I am sure there are other ideas. What are your’s?

There was a brief thread on this topic a long time ago on FoxForum.com (“Semi-hacking .SCX/.VCX PEMs for speed” thread in June of 2005). I offered to help, but unfortunately the thread and the discussion went no where. Hopefully someone will take the charge and come up with a replacement dialog.

Back in March I blogged looking for instructions to set up a Virtual Machine. I even asked this question to the attendees of GLGDW 2006. I flat out have not had a single pointer to some decent resources. This surprises me.

Since this time I have run across two good resources I want to share with you. The first is a book called The Rational Guide To: Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 (Amazon link here). It is a short book and has some decent pointers on configuration and setup of VirtualPC. While this book has some simple topics and states some obvious points, you will definitely get your US$10 worth from the read.

The second resource is a new whitepaper from Ronald Beekelaar and John Paul Cook titled Developing and Debugging Software Inside of Virtual Machines. You can get this whitepaper free of charge of on Microsoft’s VirtualPC site. Besides the testing and debugging topic, this whitepaper helps you with copying a virtual machine (VM) to save you time setting up different configurations of the same OS, making new VM, and configuring advanced networking scenarios.

Neither of these resources resolved all the things I was looking for initially, but between the two I have been able to answer most of the questions. Hopefully if you are in the market for some answers to similar questions you will find these resources helpful.

So we headed out to the pizza place to continue the meeting for some beverages. It is not unusual for our group to do this and quite often the meeting after the meeting is as good or better than the original presentation.

There certainly was some fun discussion, several problems solved, and much Fox education being shared. We did not solve world hunger, but we figured out how vendors can reduce SPAM, discussed numerous gotchas with SQL Selects in VFP 9 (and how Craig needed to use SET ENGINEBEHAVIOR 70 to work around a UNION problem with character fields and memo fields), and probably a dozen or more detailed discussions.

I got home just about an hour ago and several people joined SednaX and specifically noted how Craig’s session inspired the decision to join.

I have not had a chance to review the video recording. We decided to try a digital video camera because of the last minute decision to record the event. I am going to send it to Craig for review and possible editing and then decide if we should make it available to the rest of the VFP Community. We are not video professionals, but it has a lot of value if it worked.

Indeed, the VFP World Domination Tour stop in Detroit was a big hit.