DevBlog

Cameron Slade, Lead Tester on the Fox team answers that question for us on the VSData Team blog.

Canopy Group, the Ray Noorda company that holds interest in SCO and other companies is in the midst of a power struggle at the top. Each side has filed a lawsuit claiming the other influenced Noorda and his wife in company decisions. [Salt Lake Tribune] This will be interesting to watch as the outcome could affect what happens at SCO.

Microsoft has updated its VFP home page with information on VFP 9.0. According to Ken's January newsletter, more information is coming in February.

One of the things that has gotten Microsoft in trouble is the use of undocumented API calls. If Microsoft uses them, they could have an unfair advantage over its competitors. Calvn Hsia blogs about tracking down and removing undocumented API calls in VFP.

Well known Win32API guru and proponent and Windows developer Raymond Chen was once a Fox guy! Check out the code in this blog entry.

Update: Raymond confirms in his comments that it is FoxPro 2.6

If you've been waiting for the CDs to ship, now's the time. You can now get it from several resellers, including Foxtoolbox.com. [fiat volpes]

Longtime Fox developer David Anderson has a blog going. In fact, it's been going for more than a year. However, there is no RSS feed. For this reason alone, it won't go on my BlogRoll. David, you're using Blogger...and they make it easy to add RSS.

Wednesday, January 12. I placed an order with Amazon.com for a couple of books. Later that same day I received the shipping notice with a DHL tracking number. Knowing that Amazon.com has a warehouse just outside Reno, and that shipping from there typically took about a day, I went to the DHL web site to start tracking the shipment. I entered the tracking number, the shipping information came up, but there was no status. The online system knew that the shipping order had be made, but couldn't tell me where the book was. So, I called DHL customer service, who told me that they had no record of it being picked up, but that it was supposed to arrive in Salt Lake City that day. The customer service rep found it strange that there was no information on actual pickup. So did I. I decided to contact Amazon.com customer service...or more appropriately, customer disservice.

One way that Amazon.com keeps its costs down is by doing customer service via email. I could not find a single telephone contact number on their web site. Only email. Knowing that Amazon.com is headquartered in Seattle, I looked them up online and found several numbers. The toll-free customer service number had been disconnected. I called the corporate number, but got lost on perma-hold inside their phone system. The last number was a toll call to customer service. I actually to a real person that seemed to speak English as a first language. OK, I thought, after nearly an hour, I'll find out where my package is. Nope. I was informed that DHL had picked up the package, but no more information was available. I should contact DHL. I told the customer disservice rep that I had already done that. I was then told that since the date was still inside the delivery window, I should wait a few days. If the package didn't show up then, I should call back.

Wednesday, January 19. Well, the delivery date came and went. Still no books. DHL gave me the same story about no information and apparently it wasn't picked up. Again back to Amazon.com customer disservice. This time I spoke with someone who was obviously in a call center in India. I wanted to cancel the order and have the charges reversed on my credit card. "I can reorder that for you", I was told. That was ok...only if I could be guaranteed of next day delivery at their expense. "Yes, we can do that for you." Umm...no...they couldn't. They couldn't access my customer records. I was told to call back later. UNACCEPTABLE! I then spoke with a supervisor (another person in India) and told him I wanted the charges reversed. He told me they could do that...and they did.

I decided to try barnesandnoble.com. However, UPS was the only shipping option. I've had nothing but trouble getting packages via UPS for over two years now (since I moved nearly two years ago). I called their customer disservice number and was told that I could ship via a different method. The process was to enter the order online, then call customer disservice and they could change the shipping for me. UNACCEPTABLE!

I decided to try bookpool.com. I placed the order and requested it be sent FedEx, second day.

Then, I got an email from Amazon.com that my order had shipped. I didn't understand that because I told customer disservice to not reship. Apparently they did. A quick check online told that yes, they actually did reorder and shipped it...yup...DHL. However, they didn't charge me for the order. Since I'd reordered from a different supplier, I decided to refuse the shipment.

Friday, January 21. The books from Amazon.com arrive. I set the package aside to ship back on Monday.

Monday, January 24. The package from Bookpool arrives. I open it to find...they wrong books! UNACCEPTABLE! I have emailed Bookpool (they do not provide customer disservice via telephone) to find out how to return the books and reverse charges on my credit card. I decide, relunctanly, to keep the free books from Amazon.com.

So, now I'm down to not ordering again from Amazon.com, not order again from Bookpool, and not ordering from BN.com. If you have an online book seller that you can recommend and allows me to choose my shipping options (not UPS or DHL), let me know.

Update: Tuesday, January 25. A second package arrived from Amazon.com. I won't open it, but assume it's the other order, since I didn't order anything else from them.

Computer World has published an article on OzFox. [Kok Kiet]

Mary Jo Foley has chimed in on the recent MVP announcements.

Calvin Hsia has blogged about how garbage collection is done in VFP.

One of the most exciting things about the MVP program is the annual summit. Many think of this as a trip to Mecca. This year's summit is coming up the end of September. [YahooNews, MS Press Pass]

That comment I made in a message on the Universal Thread has caused more than one person to reply, "If I took that attitude, I'd be out of work". Oh, really??? What if the customer wanted you to do something unethical or worse, illegal? Would the customer still be right? In all fairness, the thread was about setting colors on a form. However, a bigger view of things should clarify my position.

First, you have to look at how you market yourself and your business. Are you a consultant? Do you work in a corporate IT department? A programmer? No matter what you call yourself, your job is to create applications that solve customer problems. (In a corporate IT shop, your customers are other employees.) You should consult and talk with them about what works best and why. They may come to you with ideas about how they want the application to look or behave. For whatever reason, those ideas may not be valid. Consult with them and tell them why. If, after doing that, they still insist on the "wrong" way of doing things, then do it...unless of course it is unethical or illegal.

Let's take a look at this from a different view. You go to your investment advisor and say, "I want to invest $1000 in Foobar Corp.". Your advisor may say, "That's a bad idea because Foobar is under SEC investigation". The advisor has done his job. You can still insist on investing in Foobar, and the advisor will probably take your money. There is nothing illegal or unethical about this.

Second...and this can be one of your arguements about the color settings on a form. Microsoft has published UI guidelines for Windows. Good or bad, they are what they are....and come as a result of several millions of dollars of study. One of the guidelines says that Window colors should be set by the user in Windows Display Settings. Your customer may insist on specific colors. But, what happens later if the customer hires a new employee that has trouble seeing the data on the form due to some type of vision imparement? If they could set their own colors, they would be fine. But, the colors the customer originally picked won't work for this new employee.

So, you see...the customer is not always right. He may have an opinion, and that opinion may be valid, but he is not always right.

Windows guru Paul Thurrott writes that word has come down from on high at Microsoft that Longhorn WILL ship on May 26, 2006. When I think about this, I see that scene from the Ten Commandments, where Charlton Heston as Moses, comes down from Mount Sinai carrying the stone tablets. I can't picture BillG as Moses. I see the scene from History of the World, Part 1, where Mel Brooks is Moses and says, "I give you these 15 Commandments", then drops one of the tablets and it breaks. He then says, "I give you these 10 Commandments". Longhorn is a HUGE undertaking and that ship date is still a year and a half away. I see the tablet being dropped and ship date slipping.

Microsoft has made it's Avalon Community Preview available for everyone. Warning: Do not load on any machine you can't Freeman. I'm currently loading it on a Win2K3 Server test machine and will play with it as time allows. Indigo interests me more. I can hardly wait for the Longhorn beta later this year.

Update: Be prepared...it's a 255MB download!
Update 2: Fixed typo

Yup...there it is!! On the VB home page!! (also here)!! Duncan Mackenzie, the VB Content Strategist for MSDN blogs about VFP 9.0. He's got some great things to say about VFP too.

"Visual Fox Pro has always been a wonderful product, but I never really got to use it, because by the time it came out I had started using Visual Basic, and I've never really left that language since... I did a few projects in VFP here and there, and at times it seemed leaps and bounds ahead of VB..."

Further on he states,

"The great feature set of VFP has always been nagging at my mind though, and the recent release of VFP 9 is no exception. I know it is likely an absolutely wonderful programming environment and language... it has always been very productive and very well tuned to its core task (user interfaces to database systems, which probably describes 80+% of the business apps in the world). I doubt I'll find a project to use it on in the immediate future, but if you are like me and have a MSDN subscription, you might want to install it anyway and give it a try..."

Yup, you read that right...here's one of the most visible VB guys inside Microsoft telling VB developers to give VFP a try. WOW!!! That's all I can say. [Garrett Fiztgerald]

Business Objects has released their monthly hot fixes for Crystal Reports. Each hot fix download includes a PDF that describes the included fixes. Click here for more information on hot fixes and service packs.

A rant today by a person on the Universal Thread prompted me to search back through my blog archives to find something that I wrote on why Windows is not secure....at least I thought I had. I couldn't find it. So, here goes...

Windows security has nothing to do with some great consipiracy between Bill and his "cronies" as the UT ranter put it it. It has nothing to do with Microsoft and the US government to give the FBI and other security agencies access to your computer under the Patriot Act. It has nothing to do with Microsoft trying to push products out the door to improve the company financially. It has everything to do with the history of Windows and its prominance in the market place.

Windows is built on technology that was designed in the early 90s, when security threats consisted of people in your office gaining access to your computer. The Internet as we know it didn't exist. Microsoft pushed the concept of interoperability between application through the use of DDE, OLE and later COM and ActiveX. In order for these applications to interoperate, the OS had to provide an easy way for these applications to communicate. There wasn't concern about malicious applications. We weren't all interconnected like we are now. Applications started using these communications APIs to work with each other and as the applications grew more robust, continued to rely on these APIs. These same APIs still exist today. Why? Because applications still rely on them. Microsoft closed some of these APIs with Windows XP, Service Pack 2 and people complained when applications stopped working. It was not something Microsoft took lightly. The company struggled with the idea that these programs wouldn't work and knew they would get the blame. However, they were already blamed for security holes. To close more APIs would cause more applications to stop working. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

So, what about Internet Explorer? Didn't I just say that these APIs were around before IE? Well, it turns out that IE 1.0 was introduced as an addon to Windows 95. Not many people used it, preferring to use Opera, Mosaic, or Lynx. But still, not many people used the Internet in 1995. It still wasn't what we know today. Then, in later versions of IE, Microsoft pushed for things like Active Documents to make the Internet more usable and allow web-based applications to use some of the same communications APIs that desktop apps had been using. This proved to be a big mistake as it opened security holes. (For a history of IE, go here.)

So, why can't Microsoft get things secure? Well, they are doing better, but have more to do.
I've personally heard from Microsoft executives including Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Jim Allchin, and others that security is a concern and top priority at Microsoft. And they aren't just giving it lip service. I've talked to people on down the line at MS and they tell me the same thing. Microsoft never said that Windows XP, SP 2 would fix everything. They never said that SP2 wouldn't have problems of its own. They only said that it would make you more secure...and it has. When a new vulnerability is discovered, it takes time to test things as the fix could close another API call and render that new $300 accounting package or your new game unusable. That's why it takes so long to get a fix out the door.

But, now we hear a new cry in the woods, "If FireFox can be secure, why can't IE?" Simple...FireFox doesn't carry all the historical baggage of IE. It's all new code. Can't Microsoft just write a new browser that will take care of things? No, not yet...we need some of the new technologies coming in Longhorn, the next version of Windows. The biggest thing there that will help is Indigo...a new way for applications to have communication between each other...and from what I hear, will be secure. Even better...you won't need Longhorn to use it. Inidigo will work on Windows XP and Server 2003.

I know you want a solution now...not 2-3 years down the road when Longhorn and Indigo are ready. I'd like a solution now too. In the mean time, use the browser of your choice, be aware of things that can increase your chances of getting malware, use anti-spyware and anti-virus software, and keep your system patched and up to date.

Rick Borup has joined the list of Fox Bloggers with fiat volpes. Welcome, Rick, to the Blogosphere!

Tomorrow is the second Tuesday of the month. Two things happen on the second Tuesday of the month. First, my FoxPro User Group meets. Second, and more importantly, Microsoft issues its latest security patches. According to CNet, there will be three "critical" patches issued tomorrow. Make sure you run Windows update so that your system is secure.

Fox has a reputation for blazing speed. Much of the secret on how it does this is due to it's indexing scheme. Calvin Hsia