DevBlog

A careful reading of the Visual FoxPro 8 End User License Agreement reveals this frightening paragraph:

"11.1 Upgrades. To use a version of the Software identified as an upgrade, you must first be licensed for the software identified by Microsoft as eligible for the upgrade. After upgrading, you may no longer use the software that formed the basis for your upgrade eligibility."

This is a severe limitation on developers. What this states is that if you have purchased and "upgrade" version of VFP8, that you must remove the previous version from your computer. This makes it impossible to continue work on applications that were developed in that previous version. The solution that some have proposed is to buy the full version of VFP 8 at an additional cost of $300. The reasoning given for this change of licensing is to get people to upgrade. I say, that reasoning is flawed. If you can't keep working in the older version, why buy the upgrade?

Express your opinion on this bad change in the EULA. Make your voice be heard by emailing your opinion to Ken Levy and Alan Griver.

Update 2/25/2003 10:09 AM
At the request of Ken Levy, VFP Product Manager, I'm posting the next paragraph of the EULA.

11.2 Downgrades. Instead of installing and using the Software, you may install and use copies of an earlier version of the Software, provided that you completely remove such earlier version and install the current version of the Software within a reasonable time. Your use of such earlier version shall be governed by this EULA, and your rights to use such earlier version shall terminate when you install the Software.

This doesn't resolve anything. I read this as follows:

1. You may install an upgrade IF you uninstall the previous version.
2. You may install a previous version IF you uninstall it "within a reasonable time". What is reasonable? At what point am I in violation of the EULA? A day? A week? Six months?
3. IF you install a previous version, you can't use the current version. Note that the EULA says "Instead of installing and using".

This has not changed my opinion in any way.

Yeah! Exciting news for you! My book, "CrysDev: A Developer's Guide to Integrating Crystal Reports", goes to copy edit on Monday. After copy edit, we have to go to layout, where the printer actually places everything where it will go. I get the galley proofs...and then once I ok that, it's in print. We're shooting to have the book available for Essential Fox conference at the end of April.

Crystal Decisions made some bad licensing choices when they shipped Crystal Reports 9. I have the Developer Edition and fully expect to be able to develop an application to do any reporting that was needed. However, all of the report creation APIs are disabled and don't work. I called Crystal Decisions about this and was told that I would have to buy an additional report creation API license. The reasoning for this is that some developers were using these APIs and not paying the runtime royalties. I don't have a problem with the royalty issue. What I do have a problem with is not being able to develop and test my application without coughing up the runtime fees. In the end, I was told I could get a 30 day evaluation license, but the sales rep I talked to was vague on what I do for the next application or upgrades to an application I'm working on. I owned Crystal Reports 8.5 and upgraded to 9.0 for about $300 and now have less capabilities. To get the same functionality, I need the $300 upgrade plus the $200 for the runtime API license. The upgrade price is really $500. That's a steep price to pay. As things stand right now, I can only half way develop an application.

Don't you just hate popup ads? Ok..I already knew the answer to this one. When I was in Redmond last week for the Microsoft MVP Summit, I bought a wireless network card for my laptop. It came with some web tools called Freedom. This wonderful suite of tools, from Zero-Knowledge Systems, includes an ad blocker, keyword alert that notifies you when personal information is going out to the web, form filler, password organizer, and a cookie manager. The great thing is, it all works! If you're looking to get rid of popups and protect your privacy, I highly recommend you look at Freedom.

Last night was my monthly Fox User Group (www.slcfox.org) meeting. I showed off the new CursorAdapter in VFP8. People could not believe how easy it is to drop an CA on a form, run the builder, and have it just work. If you haven't seen the CursorAdapter, you should. It will totally change the way you write VFP applications. The CA is a new class in VFP8 that lets you connect to Native, OLE DB, ODBC, or XML data. This data is then automagically converted to an updateable VFP cursor. You can modify, add, or delete data and the CA handles getting the changes back to the source database. When dropped on a form, you can bind the controls to this cursor. VERYCOOL.

Yesterday I wrote about the crappy documentation that ships with Crystal Reports. Well, the docs their technical people have access to aren't any better. There are several methods in the RDC that have a ServerType parameter. No where is it documented what ServerType actually is. The object browser simply says it's a Variant. Ummmm.. ok.. that helps. NOT! A call to Crystal Decisions technical non-support didn't help either. They did not know. In fact, they said it isn't documented anywhere. Duh! That's why I called them.

Advisor recently posted their speaker list for this summer's VFP DevCon in Palm Springs. While there are some excellent speakers listed, there are some glaring ommissions; Drew Speedie, Marcia Akins, and Andy Kramek just to name a few. What's even sadder is that some excellent speakers weren't even invited to submit proposals. Many well known people in the Fox community, me included, will not be attending DevCon. More and more this event is becoming the place to not be. Whil Hentzen puts on a fabulous conference in Milwaukee each year and if Essential Fox is at least as good this year as last, Russ Swall will be in the Fox conference business big time. If you get a chance to be in Kansas City in April, make sure you find me and introduce yourself.

Crystal Decisions really needs a new documentation department. Yes, I'm saying fire them all! Their docs are just plain wrong in many places. Buy my book when it comes out. I'm testing everything to make sure it's correct and will properly document all of it.

It seems like everyone is into blogging these days. I thought, "I'm part of everyone, I should blog too", so here I am.

I have good news for VFP developers using Crystal Reports 9. There was a change in the RDC that causes VFP to not recognize Crystal's Section events. I didn't get very far with Crystal Decisions tech support, so I posted a question about it on the private VFP 8 beta and MVP newsgroups. Brad Peterson from PSS shipped it over to Calvin Hsia, who poked at it a while. It turns out that Crystal Decisions screwed some stuff up. (Duh! I already told them that, but Calvin supplied specifics.) Earlier today I reported the findings back to Crystal Decisions and they've agreed to fix it. No time table was given, but hopefully in the next couple of months this issue will be resolved in a hotfix.