DevCon Keynote - The Road to VFP 9.0
- Last night was the keynote here at DevCon. I has the privlegde of sitting next to former Fox team member Gene Goldhammer. Susan Graham, another former Fox team member is also here. The running joke is on both their name tags. It reads "Fox Software, Perrysburg, Ohio".
Ken Levy started the Keynote with a history of Fox. It was 20 years ago that FoxBase came out. 1/2 of Fox developers today have used Fox for 12 years or more. Ken also asked how many people are at DevCon for the first time. A large percentage raised their hands. We also saw a video of Dr. Dave that was shot on Monday. He doesn't do programming anymore, but is proud that Fox is still around. After all, 20 years is ancient in the computer industry.
Richard McAniff, Vice-president, Microsoft Office was here and said a few words about the time he was one the Fox team, back when the Microsoft/Fox Software merger occurred. He worked on FoxPro 2.5, 2.6 and 3.0.
Ken then debuted the new CD case for VFP 9.0.
Calvin Hsia, Lead Dev, then took over and showed some new productivity and UI enhancements. The first was the ability to change the font in the Project Manager. The funny thing that happened right after that was the C5 error he got when closing the dialog. Other things Calvin showed:
Changing the Property Sheet font
Background compile. As you type a line of code, it is compiled in the background. Anything that doesn't compile correctly is showed underlined.
Tooltips will now show the contents of a textbox or editbox if it can't show the entire text. This also works in BROWSE.
WITH/ENDWITH now supports Intellisense.
Intellisense is supported in runtime.
There is new support for Tablet PCs. A new function to help you differentiate between a pen tap and a mouse click. Also an _SCREEN.DisplayOrientation property to turn the display 90 degrees.
If you copy code to the clipboard, it will maintain it's color syntax. This is done by putting Rich Text on the clipboard.
He then showed a Windows screen saver written in VFP.
There is a new AutoComplete property for the textbox. Think of this as how the URL combo works in Internet Explorer. The textbox will remember previous entries and display them in a list.
The Class Browser now supports .prg files.
New binary support to translate strings to binary and vice-versa.
There is new sort order support in the Document View window.
GDI+ is supported through a new Fox Foundation Class.
Calvin showed a "screen scraper". He captured areas of the screen, converted them to an image file, then displayed that capture in a VFP form. This was all done using Fox code.
Finally, Calvin showed how to use the enhancements to BindEvent( ) to hook into Windows events. He showed how to detect drive and directory changes and power events.
Alan Griver (yag), Group Manager for VS Data Tools (that includes VFP) was next. He showed some of the new SQL enhancements. The Fox team used a lot of the information from Joe Celko’s book, “SQL for Smarties”. This means that Fox is MUCH more compliant with ANSI SQL standards. Here’s what yag showed:
Coorelated subqueries
You can now do SELECTs on buffered data. This got a very good response from the audience
TOP n queries now work differently. Under VFP 8 and earlier, if you did a TOP 10 query and several records tied for the 10th position, you would get all of those, resulting in more than 10 records. Under VFP 9, you will get only 10.
Free tables now support transactions
A Binary Index type is available for binary data. Use these for things like DELETED( ).
In previous versions, FLUSH would tell FoxPro to clear it’s internal data buffers. It would not guarantee that the data got written to disk because it would not communicate with the OS or the drive controller to tell them to flush their buffers. The new FLUSH FORCE command solves this issue.
You can now save the showplan information from SYS(2054) to a memvar or a text file.
There is a new VarChar data type.
The ICASE( ) function works like IIF, but it’s a CASE.
The CAST( ) function converts one data type to another
Randy Brown, VFP Program Manager was next at bat. Here’s what Randy showed:
There is a new task pane called the Data Explorer that is used to connect, manage, and query remote data. It’s similar to the SQL Server Enterprise Manager.
A new Blob data type should be used to store binary data instead of General fields.
He showed a Fox toolbar that he wrote. Think of it like the Google, Yahoo, MSN, or A9 toolbars in IE.
Properties now have Member Data associated with them. You can define all sorts of things about a property and VFP saves it as XML For example, when you add a custom property, it is always kept and displayed in lower case. You can use Member Data to display the property how you want. A new Member Data Editor, written by Doug Hennig, helps with setting any of this information.
The Property sheet has a Favorties tab.
You can determine if the user pressed cancel in an INPUTBOX( ).
The new Anchor properties let you anchor an object to a location on a form. This means when you resize the form, the object will be anchored to the specified location.
VFP 9.0 allows you to extend context menus and replace many of the dialogs in the IDE.
You can use the PictureVal property of an Image object to hold the actual image data. This means you don’t have to refer to a disk file to display the image.
The Shape object supports polypoints, so you can have a line with multiple points.
Word wrap is supported on a checkbox caption.
Buttons have additional properties for spacing between the caption and the icon.
Labels can be rotated.
Richard Stanton then came up to show some of the new report writer features. This is the area that got the most changes and they are HUGE. Here’s some of what he showed:
Graphics are now vector-based instead of bitmapped. Images and text in a report will no longer get “jaggy” when resized.
Fonts now support Font Scripts, useful for international apps.
The right-align text now works properly
Reports use GDI+.
Report Protection allows you to make report objects uneditable in design time.
The Report Preview is written in Fox code, so you can enhance it or replace it with your own.
Labels can be rotated.
Color of an object can be changed based on a condition.
You can do graphing on a report through GDI+ calls.
Reports now support multiple detail bands.
The new ReportListener class makes lots of this stuff possible.
Ken Levy then came back. Ken talked about the following:
Resources: VFP web site, team member blogs, product support services, community resources
VFP 9.0 will have the same retail price as VFP 8.
Hentzenwerke will be publishing “New in Nine: VFP’s Greatest Hits” shortly after VFP 9.0 ships.
Universal Thread
Magazines: FoxPro Advisor, FoxTalk 2.0, CoDe Focus on VFP 9.
MSDN subscriptions
He gave the following Call to Action:
Download the VFP 9.0 beta
Test your applications on the beta
Try new beta features
Report bugs
VFP 9.0 works better with SQL Server and .NET
Check out MSDN’s Channel 9
VFP 9.0 is scheduled for release sometime in the fourth quarter of 2004. General availability will be six to eight weeks after that. MSDN subscribers will be able to download a few days after release.
Ken then showed some ideas for VFP.Next:
My. This will work like My in VB. It’s used for discoverability.
Code snippets.
Ways to access .NET classes, such as the .NET XML classes.
That seems like a LOT of stuff. And, it is. The keynote ran more than two hours. But there is a LOT of stuff in VFP 9.0. I encourage you to download the beta and start experimenting.
