Articles filed in category 'Visual FoxPro'

Before you say "Who cares, I've already seen them..." or "Who cares, I don't use Visual FoxPro...", take a quick look at this article.I think you'll discover some things that you didn't know; and if you don't currently use Visual FoxPro, you might even discover you, too, are looking forward to the next version of Fox.

Part 3, The User Interface and the Rating Web ServiceWe are finally going to get our feet wet in Visual Studio .NET and start writing some real code! In this article, we're going to focus on two areas of the ACME application. First, we will talk about the user interface and how it's implemented in ASP.NET ? along with a few problems we overcame by utilizing the powerful object-oriented features of .NET. Next, we'll write a web service in Visual Basic .NET to rate polic...ies based on their class codes. To demonstrate that web services can be used in a variety of ways, we'll consume the web service in both .NET and Visual FoxPro 7.See More

Dragon NaturallySpeaking and its associated Developer's Suite provide everything you need for speech recognition:stable ActiveX controls, quality documentation, and end-user "hand-holding" tools for installation and configuration issues.

Mar/April Editorial by Rod Paddock

In previous issues of Component Developer Magazine, we have introduced technologies such as Queued Components, COM+ Security, Loosely Coupled Events, SQL Server 2000 and BizTalk Server.Each of these represents a fascinating myriad of possibilities. But, how do you put all of them together to build a real-life, highly reliable, 100% available distributed application?

Imagine that you need some specific information in your application, such as a shipping rate. You now go to a special "service" search engine and look up the type of service you need over the Web.Now, imagine that you can get this information easily from the service and simply plug it directly into your application. Sound too good to be true? Believe it or not, the technologies to make this possible are available today. Web Services provide this functionality by bringing... to application development the same interlinked mechanisms that have made the Web so popular for Web browsing. By sharing data over the Web in standard formats, "Web Services" is becoming the new industry buzzword. Microsoft is talking about Web Services as the second life of the Internet. Web Services will tie together applications, just as the Web Browser and URL links have tied together Web pages. "The Web At Your Service" is the new mantra. In this article, Rick discusses SOAP and Web Services, then creates a sample Web Service and integrates it into an application.See More

Collections are a common way to store multiple instances of things.For example, a TreeView control has a Nodes collection and Microsoft Word has a Documents collection. Until recently, Visual FoxPro developers wanting to use collections often created their own classes that were nothing more than fancy wrappers for arrays. However, in addition to being a lot of code to write, home-built collections don't support the FOR EACH syntax, which is especially awkward when they'r...e exposed in COM servers. Visual FoxPro 8.0 solves this problem by providing a true Collection base class.See More

This article highlights some of the new toolkits and components coming out of Redmond for COM Interop.The Interop Forms Toolkit, the Interop UserControl Prototype, and the techniques used in Sedna’s NET4COM allow Visual FoxPro developers to incorporate .NET components into their applications.

Many companies have been relying on COM components in the last couple of years. That includes Microsoft.Using COM components made it possible for different programming languages to reuse logic between them, by agreeing to a standard defined by the COM specification.

Automatic asynchronous messaging is an important technique for scalable, component-based applications.Microsoft provided its first asynchronous messaging mechanism in the form of Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ). This technology is the basis for Queued Components, a COM+ feature that makes asynchronous messaging as simple as calling regular COM Components.

In this day and age, Web applications have become the norm. We've even come to the point where many development projects involve Web applications that must be installed on multiple servers.But even if you don't build vertical Web applications, it's useful to have a configuration utility that can recreate a configuration via code. This might be for backup purposes, or for high volume environments like load balancing, where multiple servers need to be configured.

Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9 is here and it brings lots of new features.This entire issue of CoDe is dedicated to Visual FoxPro 9, providing details and scenarios on how you can use the new features and enhancements. In this article, I will discuss some of the new controls, events, and commands, and a little more.

COM+ gives the developer a way to build a flexible and powerful security system into applications without having to write a lot of custom code.This article will examine how to leverage the power of the COM+ security model.

Visual FoxPro 8 offers many new features and opportunities to make life easier.In this article Rick describes how to build a native VFP-based status bar that fixes some of the problems found in the Windows Common Control OCX version (MSCOMCTL.OCX) that ships with VFP and other development tools. This article introduces several new VFP 8 features: Collections, the Empty object, AddProperty() and BindEvents(), and shows how to integrate these new features into a useful component.

As developers, we're used to data sitting in tables and databases.However, this is not how data exists in the real world?it's merely how developers want data to appear. Typically, data resides in documents and forms, emails and spreadsheets. Smart Tags are Microsoft's first serious attempt to utilize that kind of information and make it available to knowledge workers in a sensible fashion.

Visual FoxPro developers have been using an event-based methodology for a very long time.For most purposes, events are what drive the development effort. The user clicks a button, causing an event to fire, and the developer writes code to react accordingly. All of this happens very transparently and without difficulty for either party. However, from a developer's point of view, there also isn't much flexibility in this approach. But in VFP 8, event handling is changing for the better.

Among the new and improved features in Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9, you'll find the ability to extend the behavior of the reporting system when running reports.In this article, you'll learn about Visual FoxPro 9's report listener concept, how it receives events as a report runs, and how you can create your own listeners to provide different types of output in addition to print and preview.

Web Applications tend to be stateless, and running long requests can be problematic for Web backends. Long-running requests can tie up valuable Web server connections and resources. In this article, Rick describes one approach that can be used to handle lengthy requests. A polling mechanism and an Event manager class can be used to pass messages between a Web application and a processing server running the actual long task.

Whenever more than one person works on a software development project, introducing some process to coordinate the activities of the team members is a priority.The larger the team, the harder it is to manage. To meet this need, Microsoft created Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). VSTS is a state-of-the-art Software Development Life Cycle tool suite that is tightly integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. VSTS provides deep support for .NET projects; however, whenever ...a software solution includes components developed on a platform other than .NET, such as Microsoft Visual FoxPro (VFP), VSTS loses some of its value because the projects aren’t integrated into VSTS. Leveraging the extensibility features of VSTS and VFP, this article will help you integrate VFP projects into VSTS team projects enabling your team to apply a comprehensive process to your entire software development effort.See More

Sedna’s reporting features have made both the designing and rendering of a VFP report more extensible.In this article you’ll learn about a few of the new rendering objects that Sedna includes such as rotation and hyperlinks. You will also learn how to create your own custom rendering object and how to include a custom Builder interface element for it in the Report Designer.

At PDC 2005, Microsoft introduced brand new technology known as LINQ, which stands for “Language Integrated Query.”The feature-set hiding behind this acronym is truly mind-boggling and worthy of a lot of attention. In short, LINQ introduces a query language similar to SQL Server’s T-SQL, in C# and VB.NET. Imagine that you could issue something like a “select * from customers” statement within C# or VB.NET. This sounds somewhat intriguing, but it doesn’t begin to communicate the power of LINQ.

COM+ introduces a new way to architect and extend applications:The COM+ Event Service. This service is extremely flexible and much easier to handle and maintain than all other COM based event models we've seen so far. They are especially useful for business events that can now be published throughout the system without losing any control over business rules.

Testing computer software is more than just randomly executing portions of the software.Professional-level testing uses industry-accepted practices to write tests that are the most likely to find bugs. This article will examine how to use a combination of several common testing methods to maximize the results of the time you spend on testing.

The new VFP 8 feature often referred to as "Member Classes" is a set of new properties and new ways to define classes that can bring much more flexibility when working with certain controls.Need to define several pages in a pageframe with different properties and settings? No problem. How about better control of grid column headers? No problem.The new VFP 8 feature often referred to as "Member Classes" is a set of new properties and new ways to define classes that can br...ing much more flexibility when working with certain controls.Need to define several pages in a pageframe with different properties and settings? No problem. How about better control of grid column headers? No problem.See More

When you first begin using the new Visual FoxPro 8, you are sure to find useful new features that will make your development tasks easier.Several members of the Visual FoxPro developer community who have already worked with VFP 8 tell us their opinions of the best and most useful new features. Perhaps their answers will help guide you to some cool ideas you can put to work right away.

As applications become more complex, designing with components becomes a very important factor in the successful completion of projects.This article discusses n-tier application design, why it's important to modern application development, and shows strategies for breaking out the tiers using Visual FoxPro.

Word, Excel and PowerPoint all use VBA, so you would think that using Automation in one should be pretty much like using Automation in another, right? In fact, they do have a lot in common. However, there are a number of subtle differences in the way the servers operate that makes writing generic code tricky.

Web applications are essentially made up of functions that map inputs (requests) to outputs (responses).This article looks at a way to store the relationship between request and response and pre-generate responses, thus reducing the resources needed fulfill requests.

With the introduction of Visual FoxPro 3.0, error handling in VFP changed substantially.Rather than using "on error" statements, "state of the art" error events became available. Now, 7 years later, more sophisticated error handling mechanisms take center stage as Visual FoxPro 8.0 introduces structured error handling.

Microsoft has recently announced that the next version of Visual Basic will support inheritance.Visual FoxPro has had inheritance for the past 5 years, since Version 3.0, and Visual C++ has always had it. This article will take a closer look at what inheritance is and what it will mean for Visual Basic 7.

When Visual FoxPro developers take the plunge to learn .NET, the most common reaction is, “I could do such-and-such, this-and-that in VFP-how can I do it in .NET?” This special edition of The Baker’s Dozen will offer solutions for many of the typical challenges that VFP developers face when tackling .NET. I’ll start by covering .NET solution and project structures and an overview of the .NET Framework, and I’ll spend time showing how to use .NET reflection to do some of ...the things that VFP developers could accomplish with macro-expansion. Then I’ll cover different .NET features such as Generics, ASP.NET 2.0, and I’ll show how to create a reusable data access component. Finally, I’ll build the architecture for a set of reusable data maintenance classes in .NET.See More

Visual FoxPro’s (VFP) Data Manipulation Language (DML) is one of VFP’s most compelling features. It is also the most obvious feature VFP developers miss in .NET languages such as C# and Visual Basic. However, Language Integrated Query (LINQ), a new query language for .NET developers is a new feature in the upcoming releases of C# 3.and Visual Basic 9.0 that addresses these shortcomings.

New to Sedna, Visual FoxPro emulates the My namespace first introduced in Visual Basic 2005.The My namespace makes .NET Framework classes more discoverable and allows you to write less code. Sedna, the next version of Visual FoxPro (VFP), includes a My namespace as well, for the same reasons. In this article, I’ll look at how Sedna implements My.

The Data Explorer introduced in VFP 9.0 allows developers to work with different types of data from diverse data sources independent of specific projects.The Sedna update extends this already powerful and productive tool.

Visual FoxPro 8.0 introduces a whole new way to work with eXtensible Markup Language (XML).The XMLAdapter class works with hierarchical XML, provides an object-oriented approach to working with XML data, and leverages your familiarity with tables and fields in the way it exposes the XML contents.

Microsoft has significantly improved the Report Writer in Visual FoxPro 9.They also recognized the significant investment in existing FRX-based reports and designed the new Visual FoxPro 9 Report Writer to be compatible with previous versions of Visual FoxPro Reports. This makes it a great blend of the old and the new. In this article, you'll learn about some of the new features, including the new reusable data environments, report protection, and several user interface ...enhancements. You'll also learn about enhancements to layout objects and data groups. Finally, you'll learn about one of the best improvements to the Visual FoxPro 9 Report Writer: multiple detail bands.See More

Visual Studio .NET offers a rich tool set, but anyone who has ever used Visual FoxPro will soon notice that many of their favorite features are not available. However, a new set of public domain classes can add these functions to both Visual Basic .NET and C#.

You know about the importance of securing your data.But, how do you add industrial strength security to your program? The answer is simple: use the Windows Crypto API.

The Sedna Upsizing Wizard is leaps and bounds better than the version previously shipped by Microsoft in any version of Visual FoxPro.The Fox Team listened to the complaints from the Fox Community over the years about the wizard being deficient, with some fatal flaws, and recognized how it became outdated with the advent of SQL Server 2005. Sedna attempts to correct all of this and more.

XML is becoming the messaging standard of choice, and one of the key issues in this architecture is the conversion and transfer of data between client and server sides.In this article, Rick looks at a tool that easily converts Visual FoxPro tables and objects to and from XML, and demonstrates the concepts of XML messaging in a live e-Commerce application.

Visual FoxPro 8 includes numerous new features that are a direct response to the requests of VFP developers.Just reading through the "What's New" section of the documentation will take you quite a while due to large quantity of additional or changed features and commands. Let's take a brief look at just a few of the exciting new capabilities that you can put to use immediately.

Some of the early adopters of VFP 8 have contributed tips for some of the new features of this exciting release.Check out their ideas, then jump into the product and try some of the new stuff. You'll find that there is much more than meets the eye, with hundreds of additions, changes, and improvements.

Eric Rudder talks about VFP 8.

Ken Levy discusses VFP8.

Visual FoxPro 9 includes a number of IDE enhancements that make its already rich development environment considerably richer.

Web services with Visual FoxPro (VFP) have never been easy. The most common Web service tool for FoxPro is the SOAP Toolkit, which has been discontinued and which had a host of problems when dealing with complex types passed over Web Services. In this article I’ll show how you can leverage the powerful Web service features of .NET and the new Windows Communication Foundation in your FoxPro application through COM Interop.

The Visual FoxPro Team at Microsoft is enthused to announce Visual FoxPro 9.0.We'd like to include some details about Visual FoxPro 9.0 as an overview to the more detailed articles in this special issue CoDe Focus issue devoted to Visual FoxPro 9.0.

You can use ClickOnce to revolutionize how you install and update Visual FoxPro (VFP) applications. A dream come true, ClickOnce can put a stop to many of the deployment nightmares associated with distributing applications.

Welcome to the third Fox Focus issue!As I write this (publishing deadlines being what they are) I’ve recently returned from a trip to Europe where I spoke at three different Visual FoxPro conferences in Germany, Amsterdam, and France. I showed off many of the new features coming in Sedna as well as a number of the enhancements being created by the community using the awesome extensibility built into VFP.

The Microsoft Visual FoxPro team has a great reputation for responding to community requests and the next version of is no exception.Most evident in several changes to the data engine, Visual FoxPro 9 includes many enhancements for data access and database application development.

HTML and XML have made the Internet what it is today, but both technologies are not necessarily tied to the Internet.Quite the contrary! Using HTML in regular Windows applications has always been a great alternative. Paired with XML and XSL, this technique is more powerful than ever, since there are a growing number of XML sources, such as SQL Server, Web Services, and XML-enabled Business Objects.