Ken Levy's Blog : Visual FoxPro

NET4COM - .NET Toolkit for COM

klevy — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 03:51:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I spoke at the Seattle .NET Developers Association user group. I did a demo-centric presentation (no slides) showing how to create a .NET wrapper class in Visual Studio 2005, expose them as COM objects with proper interface declarations, and then use it in Visual Basic 6.0 as well as in VBA-based Microsoft Office applications. Included in the demos will be a new utility preview download called NET4COM (included in the the Sedna CTP1 download), which are wrapper classes of many useful functions in Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 classes, including features in the Visual Basic 2005 My object, and code snippets included in Visual Studio 2005. Many of these .NET wrapper classes for COM clients compliment ideas described in the existing documents found on the Coexisting with Visual Basic 6.0 web page.

The NET4COM utility idea is to bundle up many functions that the .NET Framework offers and expose them as COM objects for use with VFP or other COM clients. Some of these features can be done with Windows API calls or other COM objects that exist, but in the future more and more functionality will be evolving on the .NET platform rather than the COM based Win32 platform. An example would be to use the NET4COM.RegEx class instead of using the CREATEOBJECT("VBScript.RegExp") COM object. Cindy Winegarden blogged about some additional information about NET4COM. The NET4COM existing and upcoming classes offer a toolkit to grow in that area as well as just being a good working sample of how to build your own .NET wrappers for COM.

February 2006 letter on Visual FoxPro web site

klevy — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 02:27:00 GMT

The February 2006 letter by Milind Lele contains information about recently released FFC source for Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP1, some of Sedna feature overview documents, and the news about my upcoming transition to the Windows Live team. Milind worked on SP1 for VFP 9.0, and he has been working on Sedna since last fall. Milind is very enthused about writing the monthly letters for the VFP developer center starting with this one. Milind will post VFP related news on the VS Data Team blog from time to time as Alan Griver (yag) already does. If your newsreader is hungry for more developer-centric RSS feeds, there are more than 50 developer blogs on the Universal Thread blog listing.

From product manager to product planner

klevy — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 02:59:00 GMT

After working as a product manager in the developer division for the past 4.5 years, I've decided to accept an offer to work in a new position at Microsoft. Starting in March, I will be a product planner working on developer community efforts in a new group within the Windows Live division.

I'll definitely miss the regular interaction with VFP team members and the great Visual FoxPro community. I've also had great experiences working with the WebData XML team on the XML tools story for Visual Studio 2005, doing some community work with the VB team, and helping with content for Channel 9 both in front of and behind the camera. I expect to continue to do interviews and be interviewed for Channel 9 from time to time ongoing since it is such a great site for community efforts and transparency.

The Visual FoxPro Roadmap plans will remain the same. Some of my regular VFP related efforts will be taken over by various members of the VFP team. VS Data program manager Milind Lele, who worked on SP1 for VFP 9.0 and spoke at the Southwest Fox 2005 conference, has been responsible for driving the Sedna project since last year. Milind will also be responsible for SP2 for VFP 9.0 which planned for release 2Q 2007. Alan Griver, group manager for the VS Data team which includes the VFP team, will continue to manage all of the existing plans outlined in the VFP Roadmap. In the next few days, Milind will be posting his first letter on the VFP developer center and continue to post a new letter monthly with news from the VFP team. Additional related news can be found on the VS Data Team blog. VFP team members will be attending some of the many VFP events this year. I plan to attend the Southwest Fox 2006 conference in Phoenix this October.

I can't say much about my new role just yet. To get an idea of just some of the developer centric things I'll be working on in the Windows Live team, check out the recent 21 minute video by Robert Scoble on Channel 9 interviewing my new manager, Windows Live group product planner Scott Swanson

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MSN Messenger APIs. Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting additional news on what the VFP team is working. Later I'll be talking more about my new activities with Windows Live once I get started there.

January 2006 letter on Visual FoxPro web site

klevy — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 05:32:00 GMT

The January 2006 letter contains information about the newly released XSource for VFP 9.0 SP1, plus recent community news and plans for next month.

December 2005 letter on Visual FoxPro web site

klevy — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 01:46:00 GMT

The December 2005 letter contains information about the newly released SP1 for Visual FoxPro 9.0, plus recent community news.

Visual FoxPro 9.0 Service Pack 1 Released

klevy — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 01:45:00 GMT

Download Visual FoxPro 9.0 Service Pack 1 (SP1). SP1 provides the latest updates to Visual FoxPro 9.0 combining various enhancements and stability improvements into one integrated package.

Behind the camera on Channel 9

klevy — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 03:54:00 GMT

Recently, at the suggestion of Robert Scoble, I started going behind the camera on Channel 9 doing interviews and video recording. Listed below are the recent Channel 9 interviews I've done behind the camera. The most recent ones listed first along with Scoble's comments when he posted them on the Channel 9 web site. I have more videos in the queue to be posted soon and future ones planned on various Visual Studio, .NET language, and VFP topics.

Soma - Conversation with Visual Studio's vice president
S. Somasegar is the corporate Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft. Ken Levy took his camcorder over and had a nice chat with him to celebrate the launch of Visual Studio 2005. Soma also is blogging his thoughts on Visual Studio 2005 and other things.

Using Visual Basic as a Dynamic Programming Language
In this video Paul Vick and Erik Meijer talk about the dynamic aspects of programming in Visual Basic, both in Visual Basic 2005 and Visual Basic 9.0.

Future Directions for Data Programming in Visual Basic
Join Paul Vick and Amanda Silver as they discuss some of the features coming in Visual Basic 9.0 in this video.

Paul Yuknewicz - Working with VB Community
Do you use Visual Basic? Well, you should get to know Paul Yuknewicz. He's a program manager on the VB team (he's worked there for more than five years). Talks about his experiences working on the VB team, and what his team is doing to make the VB community a great one. At about 10:26 he gives a demo of extensions that you can get online to make VB.NET better. It all starts at http://msdn.com/vbasic.

Lisa Feigenbaum - Code Snippets in Visual Studio
Ken Levy takes his camcorder over to interview Lisa Feigenbaum and get a look at the new Code Snippets feature in Visual Studio.

Jay Schmelzer - Working on the VB Core team
Ken Levy took his camcorder over to see Jay Schmelzer, lead program manager on the Visual Basic.net team. They have a nice chat about what the VB team has been up to lately.

Somehow the video of me interviewed a year ago on First Look at Visual FoxPro 9.0 has now moved up to be the 3rd most watched Channel 9 video out of 640 total, with over 232,000 views. You can see this by going to the Ch9 Videos page and then selecting Most Views in the dropdown list filter.

Back from fall 2005 European event tour

klevy — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 02:29:00 GMT

I arrived home yesterday from my fall 2005 European event tour. I spoke at the Visual FoxPro Developer Network event in Utrecht Netherlands, in Frankfurt at the 12th annual Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2005 in Germany, and at the Switzerland FoxPro User Group in Zurich hosted by Microsoft Switzerland. All the events were a great success, thanks to all who hosted and attended. There is another great UT conference report for the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2005 along with the usual photo archive page.

In this latest UT conference report, one of the most talked about sessions at recent VFP conference is detailed: The Technical Case and the Business Case for Visual FoxPro presented by Steven Black. For those who use VFP for non-English languages, Steve has some useful links on his web site including one article on the Middle East MSDN web site called Microsoft Visual FoxPro with Arabic Support and another hosted on his own site called Using Asian Characters in a Visual FoxPro Application.

While I was in Amsterdam, I met with many people from AccountView, who recently released a new version of their upgrade of their product based on VFP 9.0. After my meeting at AccountView, I made it over to the VS 2005 / SQL Server 2005 launch event in Rotterdam and met up with our developer division VP Soma, who has a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/. We had a round table chat with some MVPs followed by the big local launch party event with about 1300 attendees. Based on a few repeat questions I've received from developers interested in obtaining VS 2005 and the various versions available, some useful links include the Visual Studio 2005 web site, an Express level, a trial editions, as well as via MSDN Subscriptions for Visual Studio 2005.

VFP based Crew Chief Pro user wins award, demo shown to Bill Gates

klevy — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 02:15:00 GMT

Jeannine Johnson of Puyallup, Washington is a Start Something Amazing Awards Winner - Sports & Games. On this web page you can see information and a short video about the award. Jeannine uses an application called Crew Chief Pro to help her compete in the sport of Drag Racing. Last week I exchanged email with Don Higgins, author of the VFP application called Crew Chief Pro and here is his summary:

A customer of mine won an award from Microsoft using my software today. Bill Gates met with her and received a crash course in my program. Microsoft sent a film crew out to her house and did the video. My customer's father is a network engineer and he knew when he received the program it was developed in Visual FoxPro since he has seen the file types before. My customer said they spent 30 minutes with Bill Gates showing the program to him. I developed my program in Visual FoxPro and I was told that Visual FoxPro was mentioned to Bill Gates during the meeting.

Don Higgins
Crew Chief Pro Drag Racing Software and Professional Weather Stations
www.crewchiefpro.com

November letter on Visual FoxPro web site

klevy — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:23:00 GMT

The November 2005 letter contains information about new content online about Visual FoxPro 9.0 and Sedna, VFP added to the MSDN Feedback center, more in-depth information about Microsoft's roadmap for Visual FoxPro, plus recent content and community news. I've been keeping my blog updated recently with more up-to-date news, so the letter contains some key information summarized from my recent blog posts here.

VB and VFP, teams and technologies working together

klevy — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 06:35:00 GMT

For many years, Microsoft has stated that there probably will never be a new VFP.NET language nor any conversion tools for moving VFP source code directly to .NET. The runtime, language, event model, etc. is all unique in VFP compared to the .NET CLR (common language runtime) and .NET Framework classes. Any conversion tool that would get some VFP code to run in .NET would probably result in poor architecture implementation, sometimes with no direct code mapping. The conversion issues and limitations are very much like the FoxPro 2.x to VFP 3.0 conversion kit, which mostly worked in some cases via code but rarely resulted in a solution architecture that would be recommended for use for long term use and maintenance. The various ways of moving a VFP solution the .NET managed code platform is to re-write a new application on the .NET platform from the ground up, to expose part of the VFP application as COM object DLLs and call into them from .NET code via COM/.NET interop, and to call COM based .NET wrapper classes from within VFP, as well as using XML web services in some cases.

Any documentation or architecture that exists on learning VS 2005, VB.NET/C#, SQL Server 2000/2005, etc. would work pretty much the same for them since learning .NET from the start in a normal way is what they will need in either case. The VFP team has stated for years that our goal while enhancing VFP with backward compatibility is to also help the VS teams add VFP-like features to .NET programming, mainly VB.NET, to help evolve it to be more and more like what a VFP.NET would be. The result is a very solid, functional, and backward compatible version of VFP in 9.0 and more and more VFP like functionality on the .NET platform. Parts of Sedna will be written in VB 9.0, and our current plans are to include all of the source code (VFP, VB, C++, etc.) of Sedna with Sedna.

I will be joining some of the VB team members on a public online chat next Tuesday from the MSDN Chat's web page, a chat on Visual Basic 9.0 Language Enhancements: November 1, 2005 at 1:00-2:00pm pacific time. Quick links: Add to Calendar and Enter Chat Room.

Description: Have you been hearing and reading about many of the exciting new features being planned for a future version of VB beyond the new version VB 2005? Would you like to get more details on what is planned for VB 9.0 directly from VB team members? Would you like to provide the VB team with feedback based on what you have seen coming in VB 9.0? Join the Visual Basic language design team to discuss some newly announced VB 9.0 features including Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and XML Literals that are expected significantly enhance the world of VB programming! If you've already read the whitepapers, played with the web preview releases at msdn.com/vbasic/future, or watched the channel9.msdn.com video interviews on VB 9.0 – then this is your invitation to talk with Visual Basic team members on whatever’ is puzzling you and delighting you about future VB language features.

For developers interested in learning more about what new VB technologies recently just been released including VB 2005, here are some resources I compiled together for reference. This is related to what is being worked on for the Sedna project and how these technologies will be adding functionality to VFP. On the VB web site on MSDN, there is a VB 6.0 Resource Center called VBRun. On VBRun is a section called VB Fusion described as: Many organizations have a significant Visual Basic 6 code base and are seeking to make the best decisions regarding this legacy code. One choice is to keep your Visual Basic 6 code, and interoperate with Visual Basic .NET to easily add functionality from the .NET Framework to your existing application. Best practices for this last option, known as VB Fusion, are discussed in this paper. Most content and context of information about VB6 moving to or working with VB.NET is very similar to the topic of VFP migration to or working with VB.NET. A useful whitepaper exists on the VB Fusion site called Using the .NET Framework Class Library from VB6, which is related to the VFP 9.0 and .NET Framework interop efforts being worked on for Sedna. The VB 2005 resource center includes many whitepapers including some on the new My Namespace feature set in VB 2005 which is something the VFP team is working on for Sedna to support My Namespace like functionality in VFP.

Some cool demos where shown in the Southwest Fox 2005 keynote on VFP interop with .NET technologies, much of which is described in the Southwest Fox 2005 UT report and outlined in the Southwest Fox 2005 keynote slide deck. I will be working on getting some of this information compiled into some useful discussion and demos for a new Channel 9 video in the near future, possibly in the January timeframe. In addition, there is a .NET for Visual FoxPro resource page on the VFP web site with technical information with a Visual FoxPro perspective for learning and programming on the Microsoft .NET platform. Today, over half of VFP developers surveyed state that they use SQL Server with VFP. Our VFP surveys also show that over half of all VFP developers have plans to use .NET in some form within the next 2 years if they haven't started already, either for new applications or for adding new functionality to existing VFP applications using interoperability. Sedna is focused on interoperability and extensibility, and this blog post is a first in many on the topic of interop.

VB and C# considerations for VFP developers

klevy — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 01:19:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, there was a thread on the Universal Thread asking which .NET language VFP developers should select for those interested in learning and using .NET, primarily those VFP developers adding .NET to their programming skill set. I received positive feedback from my UT reply post, so I thought I'd re-post it here on my blog:

The VB team and the C# team have different goals and focuses in some areas. C# focuses more on the pureness of the language and avoiding language bloat (fewer commands, more object based syntax, etc.). Most C# developers prefer writing their own source code to things rather than using libraries or higher level language commands that do things for them. The VB team is focused more in productivity, ease of use, ease of discovery, and higher level language features. VB 2005 has My dot making access to many .NET Framework and common features very easy and fast to use/discover, etc., plus many more code snippets for common actions/functions. The VB team likes the idea of query language embedded into VB to be more like what developers already know in SQL Server (SQL language, VFP, etc), while C# views it more like an object syntax into an API and lower level. There are some XML related features being planned for future VB that are much like TEXT MERGE in VB, and this is something that may not be in C# for example. The goal of the C# and VB teams are not to match feature for feature nor to match syntax, but instead to focus on their core audience of developers which has some divergence.

In some cases, it may be that a C# developer uses VB for some components (maybe data querying for example) and simply embeds the various components into one solution (meaning, some written in VB and some in C#). Some of the VFP team developers including Calvin Hsia and Aleksey Tsingauz (Aleksey wrote the CursorAdapter, XMLAdapter, SQL language enhancements to VFP 9.0, new data-types in the VFP engine, etc.) are helping the VB team with the future data-centric programming features like referencing the VFP 9.0 C++ code base for LINQ query functions, SQL language implementation, etc. as well as making the IntelliSense in VB with data a first class experience. Many of the Sedna components (the ones that use .NET via interop) will be written in VB (mostly code name VB 9.0, the version after VB 2005) with the new data/LINQ features. Alan Griver and I have been talking about these .NET language divergence issues for over 3 years now, and only until recently have the differences been more noticeable (ie, data-programming differential). More information is available online about future versions of .NET programming.

Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 now available

klevy — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 22:20:00 GMT

The final versions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 are now at manufacturing. MSDN subscribers can download these products via MSDN Subscriptions. Redistributable packages, including the .NET Framework, are also now publicly available. More information and resources online for Visual Basic 2005 and Visual C# 2005. The new XML editor is included in all of the Express versions of Visual Studio 2005, more details in my previous blog entry New XML Tools in Visual Studio 2005 and Channel 9 video on XML Tools in Visual Studio 2005.

Visual FoxPro added to MSDN Product Feedback Center

klevy — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 02:17:00 GMT

Visual FoxPro is now available in the Product/Technology drop down selection list on the MSDN Product Feedback Center. The VFP team will be monitoring bug reports and feature suggestions for Visual FoxPro 9.0, all VFP service pack efforts, and the Sedna project. By submitting suggestions and reporting bugs on Visual FoxPro, you're providing feedback directly to the VFP team. You can collaborate with the VFP team, VFP MVPs, and VFP beta testers to identify problems and workarounds and then track your feedback online. You also get notifications of changes and fixes based on your submissions. MSDN feedback will automatically log your bugs and suggestions into the internal Microsoft tracking database. The MSDN feedback center was added on msdn.com when the VFP 9.0 beta was already underway and the VFP team did not have the resources or infrastructure setup to add VFP to it back then. Adding VFP to the MSDN feedback center is something that VS Data program manager Milind Lele has been working on adding for the VFP team and community, and he will be blogging about it as needed. I'll be highlighting this information in the November letter on the VFP web site next week.

Southwest Fox 2005 keynote slides available for download

klevy — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 05:00:00 GMT

The complete unedited as-was-presented keynote slide deck on the Visual FoxPro Roadmap and community news from the Southwest Fox 2005 conference is now online, 1.6MB PPT download SouthwestFox2005_Keynote.ppt. Check out the UT conference report for Southwest Fox 2005 by Craig Boyd for details, plus lots of photos in the report's picture archive. There will be more related information in the November letter on the VFP web site next week, and more to follow in later November.