Shedding Some Light

Reboot of the computer and restarted in Windows Vista. Not many of the DAFUG members have seen VFP running in Windows Vista. Some saw it at Southwest Fox 2005 last October.

Craig’s machine is dual boot because he struggled to get Vista to run in a VirtualPC session. Overall, Craig likes Vista. He likes the Areo Glass and the desktop search. There are some changes he dislikes like hiding the Run… functionality and some of the changes in Internet Explorer.

The next step was to show VFP running on Vista and how the new look and feel is already absorbed by VFP because it already supports XP Themes. So your application will automatically look “Vista Enabled”. The menus even look improved. The Windows API calls assume the new API for Vista. For example, the Open File dialog looks different and shows file attributes not found on XP or earlier. There are glitches still, but the Fox Team is working on VFP 9 SP2 to address theses issues. This to me is the most important part of the Sedna release.

One of the neat things demoed included the new Task Dialogs. It is like MessageBox, but better. Craig wanted to show us the speech recognition, but apparently it is broken on his machine in the CTP he is running. Craig had some fun with the fact that I set him up to find a problem with the demos he had. Looks like he is out for some sweet revenge during my sessions at Advisor DevCon or during the keynote at Southwest Fox.

What a session! Two and a half hours of VFP on steriods. Great job Craig.

Pizza was good. Special thanks to Dale Zimmer for buying the pizza and sneaking it into the hotel.

 

Craig’s next demo is the SednaX GDI+ classes currently under construction by Bo Durban of Moxie Data (project manager), Craig Boyd, and a team of developers. The project is just about 80% complete. The team needs some testers and some developers to work on example code for the libary. He showed some interesting examples created by the team. One of the examples is images, which look like a command button, but has two icons on the button (something not possible with native VFP). The list of examples has grown significantly in the last couple of weeks. I am very impressed by the quality of work done by this team in a very short time. Hats off to Bo and his team!

 

Have I mentioned the price of the GDI+ classes? Free!

 

Craig took this opportunity to introduce the group to SednaX. If you don’t know what SednaX is, head over here. Craig is one of the administrators of SednaX (along with Doug Hennig and myself). This is an organization with over 650 members who potentially can collaborate to extend Visual FoxPro. Check out several of the existing projects or propose another project not yet submitted. Ideas were discussed on the types of projects that could be submitted. Craig covered some of the Mission Statement and the process of getting a project submitted for consideration.

 

More to come…

Next up is .NET integration with Visual FoxPro…

He created an ActiveX control in .NET (something you are not suppose to be able to do and is not supported). Craig created a toolbar/menu and later dropped this on to a VFP form and it works. This shows we can leverage any of the “cool” .NET controls and add it to a VFP form. Craig pointed out how this will be cool in the future with XAML. It could be the fact I have not eaten in 8 hours, but my head is starting to spin. {g}

Next we saw Craig create .NET code on the fly from Visual FoxPro, compile it and run it. All if this is done using the Vista Toolkit proof of concept he put together. He has the code inside a TEXT…ENDTEXT, passes the code to the a method on a COM wrapper he has in the toolkit, and the toolkit runs the code. This should come in handy to solve a problem I have interacting with the SQL SMO .NET assembly because Microsoft does not have a COM wrapper it.

The pizza is here, so it is time to break for dinner. Maybe my head will stop spinning.

Craig wasted no time jumping into demo after demo:

 

- Calendar control built out of a grid

- Histograms with gradients using GDI+

- Progress bars without ActiveX

- Scrollable forms without the scrollbar features

 

If you have been following Craig’s articles in The Guide to Microsoft’s Visual FoxPro on FLL creation and struggled with the concepts because it is C++, you probably can benefit from the live version of this series. Craig demoed code that intercepts a MessageBox and centers it and changes text on the buttons before it is displayed. This is all done with Craig’s *free* VFPEx.FLL. This FLL has a ton of functionality for VFP developers.

 

Next up is the popular and *free* VFPEncryption.FLL. This tool allows you to encrypt and decrypt strings and files. It supports a number of popular encryption types. The documentation is very impressive. There was a lot of discussion around this topic.

 

Then we moved on to regular expressions. Craig showed off his ability to extend the language to support regular expressions though another *free* (do you see a theme here {g}) FLL he created. His XML parser leverages the regular expressions FLL to parse apart XML. This tool is incredibly fast!

 

More to come…

 

 

Craig has started his VFP World Domination Night in Detroit.

 

He started out his session talking about VFP strengths and weaknesses. He talked about the power of one! One developer making a difference. He promoted the concepts of starting a blog, writing articles, giving sessions, taking part in the online community, and helping create positive hype about VFP.

 

He then jumped in on the power of the community. Image what 100,000 developers can do vs. the 10 people working at Microsoft on VFP. Even if it is 1% of this group: 1000 developers. Starting or attending user groups, getting to a conference, promoting the product, writing case studies and demos, influencing Microsoft, influence other developers about VFP, and the SednaX initiative.

 

The Craig discussed the future of VFP highlighting FLLs, enhancements to the IDE, .NET integration, useful libraries and tools created by the Fox Community, and world domination!

 

All givens for sure, and things I really believe in.

 

The slides are done. Time to buckle in the seat belt!

 

 

One of my jobs with the Detroit Area Fox User Group is publicity. Each month I post notices on the various forums on meeting dates, locations and topics. This month (actually in just hours) Craig Boyd is bringing his “VFP World Domination Tour” to our fair city. When I posted the notice on ProFox, Malcolm Greene requested I post a “trip report” of the event. Andrew MacNeill seconding this and is also suggesting not only trip reports, but session recordings.

Great ideas.

I am going to do my part by blogging about Craig’s session. I am not sure I will be able to keep pace with this insanely energetic developer, but I’ll give it the old college try. Watch for the posts coming later this evening and likely tomorrow.

We might experiment with the recording part as well. This is all very last minute so it might never see the light of day.

I have often said Scott Adams has a direct implant into the heads of people in the corporate world. They say humor is better when it is based in reality. So I read the Dilbert comic and blog each day to get a chuckle. Sometimes it helps me build corporate directives (doing absolutely the opposite of anything the pointy hair boss does).

 

I just took a break and caught up on this weeks comic strips and I have to tell you I had tears in my eyes from laughing.

 

“I’ll bet you ten billion dollars you can’t”, “and the loser has to introduce himself as ‘the dumb one’ “, stop it, my stomach hurts already. Want to get in on the fun? Head here and read each one for this week.

I was talking to a friend of mine today who hit a small battle on his vertical market app with potential buyers who asked him what language his app is written in. He noted it was entirely written in VFP. So the potential buyers raised a concern after a little research and noted Microsoft’s support for VFP *only* goes to 2014. They are concerned their needs for the software could reach 15 to 20 years and this surpasses the Microsoft support lifecycle.

I mentioned to my friend that Microsoft’s policy on this seems to be that extended support for their products ends approximately ten years after release. I also mentioned to him that Visual Studio 2005 (the tool his prospect recommended) has a support expiration date of 12-Apr-2016. You can see this here.

So out of curiosity I looked up the VFP support lifecycle and I was pleasantly surprised to see it has been changed to 13-Jan-2015, which is only a little more than a year before the Visual Studio expiration, and a whole year later than I had read anywhere before for VFP. This is excellent news!

Not sure how I missed this or if things have recently change, but in case I am not the last person on the planet to know, I thought I would pass it along to you.