Implementing Design Patterns in Visual FoxPro, Part 1  Design patterns offer a standard language for recognizing, defining and describing solutions to software problems. A knowledge of design patterns makes it easier to understand existing systems and to describe requirements for complex new systems. However it is important to recognize that Design Patterns are not, themselves, the actual solutions to specific problems. They are simply ways of identifying problems and describing generic solutions that have been proven to work. The actual implementation of a design pattern is still the job of the application developer.

Implementing Design Patterns in Visual FoxPro, Part 2  The first session in this series concentrated on the basic patterns that underpin the most common aspects of software design and covered a few key patterns. More generally, Design Patterns can be classified into four main groups, Structural, Creational, Behavioral and Architectural. In this session Andy takes examples from each group and shows how they can be implemented in VFP to solve some of the more complex problems that confront all developers.

The 26 Hour Day  It has often been said that good programmers are lazy. It’s not so much a question of being lazy, but more a question of making the most of your available time. Any tool that helps you to automate the trivial repetitive tasks that go along with the brain work of programming gives you more time to be really productive on the complex portions of your application.

Little things mean a lot. Any tool that saves you 30 seconds on a each task that you repeat several dozen times a day can add up quickly. Saving 30 seconds, 240 times a day effectively adds 2 hours of time to be productive to your day

Using ActiveX Controls  ActiveX controls have been around for quite a while now, and are quite widely used by developers working in other languages. However, they have never been really popular among FoxPro developers. This is a shame because there are some very good ActiveX controls available, completely free, that provide useful functionality with little or no effort. In VFP 9 SP2, DBI-tech has generously provided 8 more free activeX controls with a fresh new modern look. In this session, Marcia shows you how you can leverage some of these controls to extend your Visual FoxPro applications.

Event Handling in Visual FoxPro  VFP 7 gave us the ability to implement interfaces. This, together with the EVENTHANDLER() function, allowed us to run our VFP code when events fired in automation servers. Successive versions of Visual FoxPro have extended the capabilities of developers to interact directly with the product culminating, in Version 8.0, with the introduction of the BINDEVENT() function which gives direct access the VFP Event Model. Version 9.0 has exposed even more of Visual FoxPro’s event model and allows even greater control and interaction. In this session Marcia shows how you can put the event handling capabilities of VFP to use in your applications.