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Friday, March 27, 2009 11:39 PM

Comment/Uncomment code to switch versions quickly without using macros

In a typical day, I write or debug programs in several languages: typically Foxpro, C#, VB, C++ and 32 bit assembly, with an occasional MSIL, IDL and 64 bit ASM thrown in. Sometimes, I like to switch between one version of code and another. This is useful
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 7 Comments
Monday, July 28, 2008 2:34 PM

Make your code more maintainable: The evils of the Return statement

What does it mean to make code more maintainable? Certainly obfuscated code is hard to understand, by definition. A big part of maintainability is making it easier for others to read and understand what the code is doing. Your code may have been working
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 9 Comments
Friday, June 06, 2008 12:36 PM

Use a dictionary to help create a mnemonic

I was using a program that was yet another TLA and I wanted to create a mnemonic to help me remember what it was. One of the letters was “k”, so I wanted to find a word that starts with “k” Simple: load a dictionary, search for words starting with “k”
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 2 Comments
Thursday, May 15, 2008 7:42 PM

How to interrupt your code

I received a question: Simply, is there a way of interrupting a vfp sql query once it has started short of closing down the process ? I am running some complex queries on very large datasets which can sometimes take many minutes to complete. Typically,
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 6 Comments
Friday, April 11, 2008 12:54 PM

Examine .Net Memory Leaks

Writing programs using .Net is very productive. One reason is because much of memory management is “managed” for you. In C, C++ and other “native” languages, if you allocate memory, you’re responsible for freeing it. There were stopgap measures, like
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 8 Comments
Thursday, October 19, 2006 11:03 AM

Is this a Vista bug?

A customer reported a crash of a VFP application while running under the new version of Windows: Vista. The customer code attempted to automate the configuration of the web server (See Automating Web Site Administration Using IIS ). Specifically, there
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 4 Comments
Monday, October 09, 2006 12:26 PM

Write your own hangman game

Many years ago (1985) I wrote a C program to play Hangman. I had decoded a word processor spelling dictionary for my word source. More recently, I have encoded 2 spelling dictionaries for general purpose use: 1 with 171201 words, the other with 53869.
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 7 Comments
Wednesday, November 09, 2005 10:00 PM

Windows Security and how it affects running generated code

Here I described how VFP generates executable code and runs it for early and late binding COM clients and implementing COM interfaces. However, there is an important issue with generating and running executable code in the same process. A computer has
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 6 Comments
Monday, October 24, 2005 10:02 AM

Do you know everything about Factorials?

When I was in 7 th grade at Amity Junior High School in Orange Connecticut , I gave a presentation on Factorial numbers. Here’s some interesting code: FOR i = 1 TO 80 ?i,Factorial(i), SQRT ( 2 * PI ()*i)*(i/ EXP ( 1 ))^i ENDFOR PROCEDURE Factorial(n)
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 3 Comments
Friday, June 17, 2005 7:36 PM

What is taking up the space on your hard disk? TreeMap it!

Several years ago, I saw a presentation from Microsoft Research about online communication in communities . In particular, a group was studying online communities based on NewsGroup message traffic volume. One of the results was a graphical view of the
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 21 Comments
Tuesday, May 17, 2005 2:50 PM

Binding to Internet Explorer events: bug in Typelibrary

I was using the web browser control and getting some errors when binding to its events. This can be duplicated with the code below. To generate the event class, open the object browser (Tools->Object Browser) and select the Microsoft Web Browser Control.
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 4 Comments
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Friday, April 22, 2005 4:40 PM

Third Party application does work as a COM+ application

A few months ago, I reported a problem that a customer was having with a particular 3 rd party product that seemed not to work with Visual FoxPro. It was a COM object that could be instantiated via CreateObject. I was quite surprised that Windows guru
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 2 Comments
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Thursday, April 14, 2005 3:32 PM

Very Old Program

I was doing some spring cleaning and came across a computer printout of a program I wrote in August 1974, or about 31 years ago! That brings back a lot of memories. Coincidentally, a couple coworkers were discussing the CaSing of computer languages. What
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 9 Comments
Wednesday, April 13, 2005 1:43 PM

Floating Point calculations: comparing with zero

I was asked about floating point calculations. In particular, I can write code like this: x= 3.4 y= 10 Result=x*y ?Result,Result= 34 IF Result= 34 ?"This code will execute if result = 34" ENDIF *Output is 34.0 .T. If you add 3 zeros to x (change x to
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 9 Comments
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Friday, March 18, 2005 11:53 AM

Calling the Windows APIs for Large Files

A customer was trying to use FoxPro to handle large files. The files that Fox handles natively (like tables, indexes) are limited to using 32 bit addressing, (2^32 = 4 gigs). Back in the old days (not that long ago), there were no hard disks > 2 gigs.
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 4 Comments
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