Paul McNett has established a site at http://www.openfox.org with the mission to “help Visual FoxPro developers evaulate and integrate various open source products into their solutions.” Looking forward to watching the site develop. Paul’s had a great deal of influence in getting some issues resolved with Wine so that it will run Visual FoxPro.
Tag Archives | FoxPro
Visual FoxPro 8.0 Released to Manufacturing
Visual FoxPro 8.0 Released to Manufacturing. Here’s [bad link removed] the press release from Ken Levy, PM for Visual FoxPro. While it mainly reads like a standard Microsoft press release, no doubt created from boilerplate, there are a few clumsy and heavy-handed phrases where Ken obviously went off script. (psst, Ken: F7 will check spelling and grammar.) Ken’s no english major, so changes in tense and number often slip by.
“Microsoft currently has no plans to create a service pack” is really meant as good news: the message is that this release is *SOLID*, not that we shouldn’t expect support from Microsoft. (VFP developers tend to be a dour lot, always looking for the down side — I think it’s an effect of having been orphaned by various xBase products in the past.) How about “we’re confident that this version can be rolled out into production systems, and are not aware of any ‘showstopper’ bugs which would cause problems. Should those be found, Microsoft will respond promptly.” I dunno, the legal beagles probably wouldn’t let him say that, either.
Overall, this is good news, as VFP 8 really does contain some great updates. It’s certainly better than those products left behind at the 6.x and 7.x version…
Post dated 2003-01-11 21:45:13
Tamar E. Granor, former Editor at FoxPro Advisor, has a great editorial piece here on the marketing challenges of Visual FoxPro and proposals to rename and repackage it.
Post dated 2002-12-30 00:00:00
Monday, 30 December, 2002
An interesting article in the Washinton Post on the engineering challenges involved in weatherproofing Chernobyl for 100 years while decontamination efforts continue.
I don’t know if you bother to take time to read through the click-through EULAs, but the VFP 8 one has an interesting restriction that prevents redistribution of “Redistributables in any manner that would cause the Redistributables to become subject to any of the terms of an Excluded License. An “Excluded License” is any license that requires as a condition of use, modification and/or distribution of software subject to the Excluded License, that such software or other software combined and/or distributed with such software be (x) disclosed or distributed in source code form; (y) licensed for the purpose of making erivative worksl; or (z) redistrutable at no charge.”
IOW, you can’t give away a VFP app under an Open Source license, if you use any of their redistributables. That makes sense if they are trying to prevent sample code from entering into the freely-distributable zone, but I wonder if it is possible to generate an app that meets those conditions. IOW, you can’t include FoxPro.H, for example.
I’m pretty sure this is a new term in the license agreement, and yet another way Microsoft is attempting to stem the tide. Interesting, no?
Post dated 2002-12-04 00:00:00
Wednesday, 04 December, 2002
Wednesday, and off to Waltham for a special FoxPro? Users Group meeting.
Post dated 2002-11-17 00:00:00
Sunday, November 17, 2002
At the GLGDW conference. I did a three-hour “Introduction to Visual FoxPro?” pre-conference session. Thought it was very well-received. Talked as fast as I could the entire time with only one ten-minute break.
Ken Levy did a great keynote, 45 minutes long. Way to go!
Had the afternoon free to attend sessions. Spent the last session and break working with Mac Rubel troubleshooting his Web Services configuration. Rick Strahl solved the problem almost instantaneously by having him switch from an ISAPI to an ASP listener. Doh! We wasted three hours, but Mac was gracious enough to treat for dinner after the late night session.
At that session, a number of the speakers featured their favorite VFP 8.0 feature. They had two speakers up at once, switching the video connection on the fly, Very smoothly and quickly done. Good session.
Post dated 2002-11-06 00:00:00
Wednesday, November 06, 2002
A busy day on the road. Dropped off shoes for repair, got a haircut, an oil change, new tires, Dunkers, no books at B&N, but got to attend the monthly Boston Area FoxPro? User Group meeting.
Post dated 2002-10-23 00:00:00
Wednesday, October 23, 2002
Okay, enough of the “can you top this?” First, Monday’s cold, then Tuesday’s wickedly colder. Today I wake up to 3 inches of snow. Enough already!
Tonight, we’ll hear Toni Feltman of F1 Technologies on new stuff in VFP8 and a demo of Fox Express, at the FoxPro User Group Boston.
Post dated 2002-09-30 00:00:00
Monday, September 30, 2002
Monday at the FoxPro DevCon, and no sessions to give today. Had a great day, and made it to a session every slot, sometimes two or three.
Post dated 2002-09-29 00:00:00
Sunday, September 29, 2002
Sunday morning was spent presenting “Introduction to Visual FoxPro?,” a four-part, four-hour brain dump of everything I’ve learned in fifteen years of developing with Fox products. Pretty challenging session.
Spent the afternoon catching up with friends, beach-combing, and body surfing the really nice surf. Not a bad day.