Issue: 2000 - Summer

Summer 2000 Editorial Article

How we spent our family winter vacation: at a Visual FoxPro Conference in Hawaii!

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.

You may be wondering, with all the hype over XML, what can XML do for me today?You see the power of XML but may be having a hard time figuring out where it belongs in your application development strategy. In this article browser based applications will be discussed from the perspective of using XML as the data transport mechanism.

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.

Or: Everything you wanted to know about customers, but were too busy coding to ask.In the last issue, Nancy and Barbara gave us a brief overview of some customer relationship issues. This time, they take a closer look at the initial contact phase.

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.

Inheritance is one of the fundamental facets of object-oriented programming. In this article,Steve looks at inheritance, and in particular some of the mistakes that many developers make when applying inheritance.

Windows DNA (as well as the recently announced .NET), and component based development in general, are fascinating approaches to application development.They provide great flexibility, scalability and freedom of distribution. Unfortunately, there has been a substantial delay in the widespread implementation of DNA applications. Surprisingly, the responsibility for this delay seems to lie with developers...

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.