FoxPro News:

The big news is that VFP 7.0 is now officially out of beta, and in pre-release.  The official release date has not been announced, but is expected to be "soon", maybe mid-July (but don't quote me).

 

Main Presentation:

There was no official presentation this month, since the main business of this meeting was to elect officers.  Most of the candidates ran unopposed, so the results were largely unanimous, and no lawsuits were filed.  <g>

The results are as follows:

• President:              Mike Potjer

• Vice President:      Martha Kroll

• Treasurer:              Mike Potjer

• Secretary:              Vacant  (any one want to volunteer?)

• Web Master:         Glenn Domeracki 

 

Cool Tool:

This month's cool tool was Stephen Sawyer's ViewEditor, presented by Mike Potjer.  The ViewEditor is a utility designed to overcome many of the limitations of the VFP View Designer, providing easy access to some of the properties that are not made available by the View Designer, and allowing developers to create complex views that could only be maintained in code otherwise.  Some other useful features include the ability to copy properties such as default values and captions from the table fields to their related view fields, and a button to copy to the clipboard the CREATE SQL VIEW and DBSETPROP() commands needed to recreate a view exactly as you've designed it in ViewEditor, allowing you to paste the code into a .PRG file, if you prefer to continue maintaining your views in code.  There is more, of course, but you can check that out for yourself.  Steve has given GRAFUG permission to make it available to our members, so you can download it from our site.  Although ViewEditor is very stable (I haven’t been able to crash it), it is still officially in beta.  Steve is considering releasing the utility as part of a package of tools, which would be available through www.geeksandgurus.com.
Download ViewEdit2025.zip

 

Open Discussion:

The rest of the meeting was devoted to problem solving and open discussion.

1. Rick Bean told us that he had found a way to add time-out capability to the VFP MESSAGEBOX() for VFP 6.0 and earlier.  If you don't want to wait until VFP 7.0 to get this functionality, check out his MESSAGEBOXX.PRG wrapper program.
   Download TIMEDMB.ZIP
   

2. Mike Potjer offered a suggestion making sure that your application is using the correct version of the database.  If you are using a database container (.DBC), set the database version number property (via DBSETPROP()), or add a version number to the database comment.  Store the same version number in the application, and have the app compare its version number to the version number in the .DBC.  If the numbers don't match, alert the user and exit the app.
   

3. We also talked about some of the new features of VFP 7.0.  Rick Bean converted the new features documentation from the Beta 1 version into .PDF format, which is available here for download.  Microsoft also has information on version 7.0 at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro/technical/articles/vfp7/default.asp.
   Download VFP70.ZIP

Next Meeting:

GRAFUG will not meet in July and August.  The next meeting is scheduled for Sept. 15, 2001.  Please note that this is not our usual 2^nd week of the month, due to a conflict with Advisor DevCon.  The main topic for this meeting will likely be "What I learned at DevCon".  If you will be attending this year's DevCon, and would like to present your impressions of the conference, please let us know.  We will try to give all attendees a chance to have their say.  If you aren't able to attend DevCon, this is an excellent opportunity for you to find out what's new and exciting in the world of the Fox.  More details of the meeting should be forthcoming as we get closer to the meeting date.