yag: Community and Architecture : Visual FoxPro

Windows Vista border issue and SP2

YAG — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:15:00 GMT

We've figured out the Vista border issue (we think). We couldn't reproduce it here, but Jim Slater noted that it happens for him when he changes the bordertype in the init. As Calvin mentioned in these blog entries:

Windows Vista Aero BorderStyle Paint problem as non Administrator

Fix your forms to paint borders correctly under Vista Aero

Vista doesn't allow you to change the border type after the window is created unless you are running as administrator (in fact, he duplicates this in C++). He discusses ways around this - but this is not an SP2 issue - there's nothing we can do about this in our SP.

SP2 comments

YAG — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:10:00 GMT

I've been reading the comments here and on some sites about SP2. I wanted to give my point of view about it and ask for a few things from the community.

Milind, Calvin, Aiwen and I have been going thru the reports and trying to reproduce them here on multiple OS' and on SP1 and SP2. We haven't been able to succeed. Tonight I heard from John Koziol that he and some former VFP testers were testing SP2 (on XP) as well and they came to the conclusion that it is stable as well.

So, that leaves us in a bit of a bind. One thing that occurred to me over the weekend is that some folks that are seeing problems may have installed SP2 over the beta - which is not supported and may have left files in a strange state.

So, if you are having issues (let's start with the Vista ones), can you please be sure you installed SP2 over a plain vanilla VFP9?

For instance, on VFP9 SP2 fixed the following bugs reported here on my blog:

The intellisense bug: try to use arrow up/down to select the items show from intellisense got multi-selection
Windows Vista Aero BorderStyle paint bug as Calvin talked in his blog.

We tested both of these in multiple combinations and kept getting correct results.

Oh, and for Bernard Bout's DateTime bug - we think that happened due to another fix for DateTime (kinda like what happened when we fixed the GROUP BY in an earlier version of VFP), but we need more info to repro it. One workaround to please try is to use methods (rather than properties) that return DateTimes.

Feel free to leave comments here if you've reported something, or even better, via Connect.

Thanks!

Updated SP2 now online

YAG — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:53:00 GMT

It may take around a 1/2 hour to propogate to all the servers, but it's now online.

Whoops!

YAG — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 05:02:00 GMT

As some of you have noticed, we had a bug in our SP2 release. We forgot to update the file with the splash screen in it. Nice getting back online to messages about it. My thanks to those of you who mentioned it nicely. <g>

Anyway, Milind and I have already started putting together the files and process needed to get a new version out there. Hopefully it will be out tomorrow. Sorry to everyone about the restart...

Free DBI Controls with VFP9 SP2

YAG — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 02:12:00 GMT

Now that SP2 is out, you can go ahead and download the free ActiveX controls being made available by our friends at DBI. The controls include the following:

	ctTray		Offers developers direct access to the standard Windows System tray for presentation of application icons for example
	ctDEdit		The perfect masked edit control for date and time entry
	ctContact		Outlook-style contact list with find and in-line item editing
	ctToolBar		Full Windows XP styling of the ToolBar and ToolBar menus
	ctListBar		The only multi-column ListBar control outside of Visio
	ctDays		A fully modifiable Outlook-style single column DayView control
	ctDropMenu		A drop-down, pop-up menu control with individual item image and text/sub-text features.
	ctFrame		Manage an array of components within a single component. ctFrame makes it easy to create boxes, title bars, and container objects with a variety of border effects.

VFP9 SP2 Ships!

YAG — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:18:00 GMT

As stated in the latest monthly letter, we just shipped Service Pack 2 (SP2) for VFP 9! You can download it here. We've also made the bug list available.

The source code to the VFP and VB.NET components will be made available next week.

My thanks to everyone on the team that worked so hard to make this happen.

German VFP, SQL Server and .NET conference in October

YAG — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:51:00 GMT

I'll be speaking at a conference in Frankfurt, Germany on November 8-10. I'll be keynoting the VFP conference and doing a session on VB.NET (including things like LINQ, Silverlight and future releases). This is one of my all time favorite conferences - Rainer really focuses on the attendees - great food, lots of chances for 1:1s with the speakers and other attendees, just an overall wonderful time. Click on the pictures to go to the website for the conference.

VFP and the VB Interop Toolkit

YAG — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:42:00 GMT

I'm here in Prague, have to head back to the conference for the Q&A session, but spent some time reading my RSS Feeds. Bernard Bout has a "How To" article on using the VB Interop Control Toolkit with VFP. I showed this in my keynote here, using a similar example. I also used the kit to create a control that can host WPF in your VFP form. If you want another example, check out Beth's blog entry on the toolkit.

Off to Prague!

YAG — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 01:31:00 GMT

I'll be leaving this week for the annual VFP Devcon in Prague, Czech Republic. This is the largest VFP conference in the world and I had a great time there last year. Great speakers, great price.

How I feel about making the VFP announcement

YAG — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 00:53:00 GMT

I said earlier that I wasn't really ready to talk about how I feel about the announcement. I did, however, post something on the Universal Thread last week in response to a question that a few folks have told me I should post here. Interestingly enough, since I know so many people on the UT personally, though it was hard, I felt more comfortable writing it there.

That said, I understand that there's a group of people here who are not on the UT - and like I said, enough friends and people I trust have told me that I should do this, that here you go. As one long time VFP developer said - this will show people that MSFT is made up of people who have feelings also. That may actually make a good post in itself for one day.

Anyway, this is what I posted in response to how I felt being the one to make the announcement (and read the hundreds of messages, take the phone calls, etc.). Also, please note that I wrote this while in one of the MVP presentations last week during the summit.

yag

---------------------------

Good and bad. Like everything else, I guess.

I was one of the first people to bring VFP into corporations and write books about it and publish dev standards. Incredibly blessed to be part of this community - met most of my best friends here, got to work with Ken and Paul on VFP3 as vendors, got to work with the team the past few years.

I feel very proud of how hard everyone has worked on the product. I feel proud of how even newcomers like Milind got into the community (favorite quote "when I don't have the monthly letter up on time, I get emails asking if my back went out again. They are amazing").

I'm amazed at what the community has done to work with us on the product. Localization, helping each other, Codeplex stuff, etc. I'm happy that this will continue.

I'm sad that this moment has come, but I'm glad that I was here to make sure it was handled as well as it could be. I'm proud that there was never a question that we would openly stand up and share the decision when it was final and participate in these conversations. I'm glad that I could tell the MVPs in person. I'm glad that I could spend the time to read well over 500 messages and counting (between here, other forums, newsgroups, my email).

I am humbled by the reaction of some of my friends from over the years (ex-Flashers, folks I haven't talked to for years) who immediately asked me "are you ok?" (and now I'm starting to tear up). I'm amazed at the number of folks on the VB.NET team and their community who've asked me the same thing. I also was humbled that when I offered to not do the keynote in Prague, in favor of someone who is leading the VFPX project, Igor wouldn't hear of it. He made me feel welcome at a time that I was worred what the reaction would be. Till then I thought that I could lose many of my friends because I made the decision to be the one to announce this. (tears are coming down now - and I'm hoping none of the MVPs around me notice).

I've been surprised that I have only gotten a few messages along the lines of "I wonder how you can sleep at night, knowing the thousands of devs who are losing their jobs this week". I've been happy that when I responded to these, talking about the decision, Codeplex, pointing to blog entries, etc., that I've always gotten apologies from the people within a few emails.

So in short, like Doug Dodge would say, I feel blessed.

yag

More thoughts and comments

YAG — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 02:05:00 GMT

Had a few more questions come up. I'm still at the MVP summit, but keeping up as much as I can.

What about the MVPs?

The MVP program is tied to the communities, not to the products…so to the extent there are active/vital communities, we would expect to continue to recognize and award outstanding contributions. So yes, there will still be VFP MVPs.

You mentioned two VFP influenced frameworks. What are they?

Mere Mortals and Strataframe

Thoughts and comments

YAG — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 21:50:00 GMT

Since we made the announcement, I’ve been reading comments on this blog and others as well as various community sites like the Universal Thread. The comments have ranged from the good to the, er, not so good <g>, to the challenging. I’ve also personally spoken to over 50 different companies, people, etc., over the past two days. I’d like to give an overview of what I’ve heard, some comments, and go from there. I’m doing this in largish buckets – for simplicities sake. I’ve also received comments in English and a lot in Spanish (I suspect the folks at PortalFox have a long thread going – sorry I don’t speak Spanish or I’d jump in. I’m sure someone will translate this over there – and I appreciate that).

This was something to be expected. No need to panic though, things will continue to work. Also, Microsoft is killing VFP.

These are two sides of the discussion. Craig Berntson wrote about it on his blog in detail. I obviously agree with the “no need to panic” approach. Recently, someone blogged from OzFox about what a large percentage of people were using Fox 2.6. Note that Fox 2.6 hasn’t been supported for years, but it still works (if anyone has a pointer to this post, I’d love to link, but I can’t find it). It is an opportunity to start exploring what other programming languages you might like to learn.

Additionally, VFP will continue to be supported for 8 more years. The MVP program will continue as long as there’s a community. The capabilities will continue to grow with things like VFPX. In fact, one of the things I’m proudest of is that while we can’t open source the core, the extensibility model allows folks to keep adding new capabilities.

How are you doing, yag? What about the team?

This was really nice. I didn’t expect to get so many people asking how I’m doing. A similar issue came up at the MVP meeting where people asked what the team would be doing. It’s so nice when people realize that we’re part of the community and are affected by this also. Calvin and I have both been involved with Fox for over 20 years. In the MVP meeting, we had three of the original MVPS (Calvin, Tamar and myself). Brought back a lot of memories.

I’m moving to Linux, Python, etc.

Where you want to go from here is really up to you. I can say, however, that the VFP team is working on the next version of VB.NET (as we’ve talked about for over a year now), and there are some interesting tools that help you either go to .NET, or integrate new .NET code with your VFP applications. There are also at least two .NET frameworks written by folks who come from VFP. There is also a good community on the Universal Thread made up of VFP people who have already added .NET to their repertoire. But again, it’s up to you.

Thank you for giving us the chance to keep this going ourselves

Alex Feldstein blogged about this. He focuses on the fact that VFP “is a mature product with a great set of features”. He’s happy that we’re releasing Sedna at no charge and making the source code available to be enhanced by the community. He also gives a nod to the community projects that are already out there (and they are awesome – GDI+ support, an Outlook toolbar control, integration with MSBuild, and much more).

How about open sourcing the core product too?

We’ve been asked this for years. That’s not going to happen. The main reason is that there is too much intellectual property in the VFP core codebase. Someone on the Universal Thread also noted that it’s written in C and C++. How many folks in the community are prepared to learn an 18 year old codebase in a language that they don’t typically use? I know that I wouldn’t take it on. <g> Think back to code you’ve written and maintained for 18 years. Now picture giving it to someone else.

Mary Jo Foley: "Microsoft to release FoxPro ‘Sedna’ as Shared Source"

YAG — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 04:51:00 GMT

The first article from the announcement today (that I've found) is from Mary Jo Foley:

At the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Summit in Seattle this week, Microsoft officials shared Shared Source news with the Visual FoxPro faithful and other attendees. The latest: Microsoft plans to release by the end of this summer the Foxpro "Sedna" bits as Shared Source on its CodePlex code-repository site.

Read the rest here

Twenty years and counting...

YAG — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 04:33:00 GMT

I was talking to some of the MVPs today about the VFP announcement that we've made and we started talking about some of the things we've shared over the years. I've been involved with Fox since Foxbase days back in 1986 or so. Many of my best friends come from the community.

I'm not really ready to talk about everything that I'm feeling right now, but I do think that taking major portions of the product and setting it loose in the community via Codeplex just feels right. Foxbase, FoxPro and VFP have always been driven by the needs of the folks that use it (I remember the first feature that I remember directly influencing); and that can continue due to our rich extensibility.

As far as the team goes - we're going to finish the work on SP2 and on Sedna. And that's going to be our focus tomorrow and on thru summer.

Message to the VFP Community

YAG — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 04:13:00 GMT

We just posted the following to the VFP site. I'll write more later:

A Message to the Community

We have been asked about our plans for a new version of VFP. We are announcing today that there will be no VFP 10. VFP9 will continue to be supported according to our existing policy with support through 2015 (http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=7992). We will be releasing SP2 for Visual FoxPro 9 this summer as planned, providing fixes and additional support for Windows Vista.

Additionally, as you know, we’ve been working on a project codenamed Sedna for the past year or so. Sedna is built using the extensibility model of VFP9 and provides a number of new features including enhanced connectivity to SQL Server, integration with parts of the .NET framework, support for search using Windows Desktop Search and Windows Vista as well as enhanced access to VFP data from Visual Studio.

Concurrently, the community has been using CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com) to enhance VFP using these same capabilities in the VFPx and VFPy projects. Some of these community driven enhancements include:

Support for GDI+
An enhanced class browser
Support for Windows Desktop Alerts
An object oriented menu system
Integration with MSBuild
A rule-based code analysis tool similar to fxCop in Visual Studio
An Outlook Control Bar control

To reiterate, today we are announcing that we are not planning on releasing a VFP 10 and will be releasing the completed Sedna work on CodePlex at no charge. The components written as part of Sedna will be placed in the community for further enhancement as part of our shared source initiative. You can expect to see the Sedna code on CodePlex sometime before the end of summer 2007.

The VFP team

UPDATE - We're having issues getting the update on our MSDN site. It will be up soon, hopefully.