Meeting Recap for February 10, 2001

Hi Everyone,

I want to thank everyone that attended our meeting, especially the newcomers. We had a total of 9 people attending (the weather was not in our favor). Six of those were returning members and the rest were new to GRAFUG.

SPECIAL THANKS:

I want to extend a special thanks to Optimal Solutions for providing the facilities as well as the beverages for our meeting. We really appreciate it. I also want to extend a special thanks to Dave Russell who provided the donuts for everyone (and the chocolate ones for me!). And thanks to Martha Kroll who volunteered to bring next month's donuts.

EDUCATION:

One of the new comers mentioned his difficulty in making the transition from 2.x to VFP and that sparked a long "help" session from others. People were very eager to offer suggestions from frameworks, to books, to all kinds of gotchas. One book that was recommended by many was Hacker's Guide to Visual FoxPro 6.0 by Tamar Granor and Ted Roche (Hentzenwerke Publishing)

Along the lines of learning, Cathy Pountney announced the up and coming Online VFP Tutorial that will be hosted by the Virtual FoxPro User Group (VFUG.org) website. 
The Visual FoxPro Education Center on VFUG.org

The Virtual Foxpro Users Group is pleased to announce the opening of The Visual Foxpro Education Center. The Center will house a resource database that will be a centralized location for finding Foxpro tips, help, articles, white papers and other learning resources. The resource center is currently under construction. The Education Center will also host a free multi-level online tutorial. The tutorial is being coordinated by Barbara Peisch, Carl Warner, and Tom Gahagan and will be written by an outstanding group of authors that are well known in the Foxpro community. They include: Barbara Peisch, Barbara Paltiel, John Koziol, Larry Miller, Nick Nekliovdov, Cathy Pountney, and Tom Gahagan.

The first lessons of the tutorial are scheduled to go online the last of February. When completed the tutorial will consist of three levels that will take the learner from beginning concepts to advanced material. You can visit the Education Center online to find out more information about the tutorial and its authors. The web address is: www.vfug.org and membership to the Virtual Foxpro Users Group is free. At the opening page (after login), click on the Education Center link and then find the link for lesson outlines and author information.

MAIN PRESENTATION:

Cathy Pountney presented Tips and Tricks for the FoxPro Report Writer. She showed 15 different tips that help you get more power out of the Report Writer and overcome some of its pitfalls. The presentation was based on her series of articles for FoxTalk. The first article appeared in the December 2000 issue and two more articles are slated for the February 2001 and March 2001 issues. See the Download page to download her source code. 

COOL TOOL:

This month's "Cool Tool" was presented by Glenn Domeracki. He showed Michael G. Emmons' ClassNavigator utility. This utility makes working with programmatic classes much easier by building a class hierarchy in a treeview format. Glenn also showed some of his own enhancements to the utility, such as OLE Drag & Drop. See the Download page to download his source code (** NOTE ** This download is only available to those who attended the meeting and a password will be required to unzip the file.)

NEXT MEETING:

The next GRAFUG meeting will take place on Saturday, March 10th. The meeting will start at 11:00am and run till 1:00pm (or later). Following the meeting, those interested will be going to lunch at a local restaurant. (Click here for directions)

As of yet, I don't have a specific main presentation or cool tool presentation scheduled for the March 10th meeting. If there's anything that you'd be willing to present, please send me an email and let me know.

FUTURE PRESENTATIONS:

We have a special presentation scheduled for the April 14th meeting. The Feltmans with F1 Technologies in Toledo, Ohio, will be here to discuss two topics: Visual FoxExpress and xCase. The presentation is expected to last 2-1/2 hours so expect this meeting to run longer than usual. We also plan to order in pizza instead of going to lunch afterwards.

CONCLUSION:

I hope everyone finds this information helpful and if you have any comments, please send them to me. I look forward to seeing everyone at the next GRAFUG meeting!

Cathy Pountney

GRAFUG President & Secretary

cathy@frontier2000.com

 

Return to Archives page