News
Time is running out to sign up for some of this year’s North American VFP conferences. Here’s what is still coming up:
DevEssentials 2004
Kansas City, MO, June 4-7
DevTeach 2004
Montreal, Canada, June 19-22
Advisor Visual FoxPro DevCon 2004
Las Vegas, NV, September 29 - October 3
www.advisorevents.com/CMX0409p.nsf
Southwest Fox Conference
Tempe, AZ, October 22 – 24, 2004
Ken Levy’s May newsletter is available at the VFP Developer Center, as well as new VFP 8 code samples.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro/
Main Presentation
The announced topic was an open discussion of .NET. As it turned out, we discussed a number of things unrelated to .NET.
We began talking about reporting, and the SQL Server Reporting Services in particular. If you have an MSDN subscription that includes SQL Server, the June subscriber updates include SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/new/default.aspx
For more general information, you can go to the MSDN web site, and search for “reporting services”.
There was a question about how to get a Windows application to take full advantage of high speed, bi-directional dot-matrix printers, since Windows doesn’t seem to understand the need for *fast* dot-matrix printing. One possible solution we talked about was the Virtual Print Engine ActiveX control. In addition to including VFP samples (imagine that!) and a fully functional demo, it provides events which allow you to send PCL codes to the printer each time a page prints. You can check out Ideal Software’s site for more info.
http://www.idealsoftware.com/EV_concept.HTM
If you have had successful experiences printing to dot-matrix from Windows, we would like to hear from you.
Next, we talked a bit about the general concepts of n-tier development, primarily how you go about writing an app to be “n-tier”.
If you happen to moving to VS.NET, one recommendation was to check out Borland’s “Together Solo”, a design and analysis tool which integrates with several development platforms, including .NET. You can find white papers and other info on their website.
http://www.borland.com/together/solo/index.html
Upcoming meeting
The June meeting is scheduled for June 12, 2004. We do not meet in July and August, so this will be our last meeting until fall. The NDA on VFP 9 should be lifted, and the public beta available by then, so we will be talking about and showing VFP 9. If Cathy Pountney is able to attend, expect so detailed info on the *NEW* VFP report writer (yes, MS finally listened to you!).
Hope we’ll see you there!
GRAFUG President
potjerm@optimalinternet.com