Foxite.COM Community Weblog – Joel Leach

for a while now, i have debated whether or not to post this entry.  about six months ago, i wrote most of this article, then decided not to post it.  so yeah, i'm wishy-washy on this one.  since then, microsoft has put a lot of emphasis on html5 and introduced windows 8 and the metro ui, leaving a lot of existing ms developers wondering about the future of their previous technology choices.  with that in mind, i think it's good to look at microsoft's treatment of vfp and how their decision processes work in regard to development tools.

can you… Continue reading →

like many developers, i spent much of last week and the weekend watching the microsoft build conference and learning about windows 8, the new metro ui, and the windows runtime (winrt).  my first impression of the metro interface was that it is compelling and i like it.  that has faded a bit as i get into the details of what you can and cannot do with the new architecture.  there is a lot to like about the metro user and developer experiences, all of which you can learn about at microsoft and the blogosphere.  as a developer, i’m thinking along… Continue reading →

years ago, intel added a hyperthreading feature to their cpus before dual-core
processors were available. more recently, intel reintroduced the technology into
their "core i" series of processors. what is hyperthreading and how does it
affect parallelfox?

when i first heard of the technology, i thought that it basically divided a
single-core processor in half. for example, i thought a 3.0 ghz processor was
divided into two 1.5 ghz processors, so i promptly turned it off on new
machines. i'm not sure where i got that idea, but it was completely wrong. so,
what exactly is hyperthreading? let's start with… Continue reading →

i just released parallelfox 0.7 on vfpx.  this release features... wait for it... documentation!  that was the big piece missing from parallelfox.  i created parallelfox.chm with west wind's excellent html help builder.  the help file is designed to be used in conjunction with the training
videos i made previously. use the help file as a quick reference or short overview of
topics. watch the training videos for more in-depth discussions,
examples, and techniques.

this release also includes improved intellisense. parallelfox takes advantage of doug hennig's favorites for intellisense, which doug also used in the my project for sedna… Continue reading →

five years in the making (i say that like it's a good thing), or even longer if you go back to when i first started playing with this concept, foxtabs has finally reached the coveted "production release" status on vfpx.  actually, it has been stable for quite some time now, but since foxtabs works so closely with the internals of vfp, it's the kind of project you want to let incubate for a while so you can shake out all the bugs.  causing c5's in the vfp ide doesn't win you any popularity contests!  many developers have been running… Continue reading →

parallelfox 0.6 beta was released today.  earlier this week, i posted a couple of new training videos about worker events on vfpx.  when i started, i figured the training video would be 30-45 minutes to cover all the features in parallelfox.  i'm now up to 4 videos clocking in at almost two hours.  part of that is my slow presentation (sorry for that, i was doing most of it off the cuff), but if you've ever put together videos like this, then you know how time consuming they are.  i feel like it was important to actually demonstrate those… Continue reading →

parallelfox is a parallel processing library for visual foxpro that i've been working on for a little while now. parallel processing is getting a lot of attention these days and with good reason.  parallel extensions/libraries are popping up for all languages/platforms, and if vfp were still in development at microsoft, i'm sure the fox team would be hard at work on adding those features for us.  but, that's no reason for us to do without.  foxpro developers can benefit from parallel processing just like everyone else, and parallelfox aims to help us do that.

the first beta release of parallelfox… Continue reading →

i know... i've been seriously neglecting my foxtabs duties... again.  after a long delay, foxtabs 0.9.2 has just been released.  there have only been a few issues since the last release over a year ago.  unless new issues are introduced in this version (very possible), i expect this version will become a release candidate, and then version 1.0. 

one of the reasons for the delay was an issue discovered by greg green, and i wasn't sure of the best way to handle it.  greg has created several replacements for the standard vfp editors and designers.  (if you are interested in… Continue reading →

sunday rolled around, and i couldn't believe it was already the last day of the conference.  sleep deprivation was starting to set in, and i had more sleep than most.  still, i wasn't about to miss any sessions.

vfp and mysql: case study for remote data
rick schummer

for the purposes of this session, "remote data" meant using a database server that resided anywhere, on a local server or out on the internet.  rick started off with some client/server basics and the various ways you can access remote data from vfp.  it's common knowledge that sql passthrough is the… Continue reading →

saturday morning started off with three sessions on architectural/oop topics, so i was looking forward to it.

data driving applications

toni m feltman

toni is another of my favorite speakers and i love her speaking style. there have been previous sessions about using meta data in frameworks, but this session was more about refactoring legacy code (there’s that subject again) into data. a real-world example she gave was code that ran for specific users. the users were defined by an if inlist(“user1”, “user2”, etc.) command that was duplicated many times throughout the code. if that sounds ridiculous, perhaps you have… Continue reading →