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Working with communities
Michel Fournier, March 1, 2002
In the last month, we received dozens of emails from satisfied persons in regards for our initiative of opening the magazine and the Universal Thread in general for additional communities such as the Portuguese and Spanish communities. Regulars members of the Universal Thread, new members, Microsoft...
In the last month, we received dozens of emails from satisfied persons in regards for our initiative of opening the magazine and the Universal Thread in general for additional communities such as the Portuguese and Spanish communities. Regulars members of the Universal Thread, new members, Microsoft employees, members from France and from our team all agree that the initiative was a good move and will help to solidify the communities foundation of the magazine and the Universal Thread in general.

Following Microsoft's Steve Ballmer's quote "Communities! Communities! Communities!", one of the major targets of the Universal Thread in 2002 is geared toward that direction. From MSDN Brazil who helps us a lot with the magazine to the Microsoft .Net team contribution on the Universal Thread, the communities are getting strong than ever.

In the last month, I have exchanged a lot of information with Universal Thread members from Brazil, Portugal, Spain and French in order to enhance the Universal Thread engine to make things easier for foreign language speakers. We already did some work on that and will continue to enhance that aspect of the Universal Thread. In addition to our base English interface, we support French, Portuguese and Spanish interfaces as well as offering dedicated Visual FoxPro forums to create content in those languages.

UTMag/RapoZine team

Editors

Michel Fournier
Claudio Lassala

Translators

Eduardo Vidigal
Rodolfo Duarte
Fábio Vazquez
Claudio Rola
José Cavalcanti
Mauro R. Chaves
Moacyr Zalcman
Ricardo Soares
Fábio Vieira
Martín Salías

In this issue

Interviewer

Gérald Santerre

Writers

Wayne Myers
Mike Helland
Fábio Vazquez
Fábio Vieira
Alessandro Orlando
Claudio Lassala

Interviews

John Petersen

Monthly profile

Martín Salías
Don't hesitate to forward your suggestions to Michel, Claudio or Martín Salías about how we can make your presence on the Universal Thread a pleasant one in regards to the Portuguese and Spanish communities. The same goes with the magazine. The joint brought a new dimension to the magazine by bringing writers from various communities under the same roof. It's good to see articles coming in from writers from around the world. For our next issues, we look forward to continue in that direction by including articles from Spanish writers.

As for UTMag/RapoZine magazine, in addition to the online version, the English version now supports an offline edition as the Portuguese version does for a few months. So, for those that wish to read our magazine offline, you can access our store and select the issues you wish purchase. The offline edition is available for a small cost of 5.00$ CDN per issue. Once the order processed, you will receive an email with the file for the related issue.

Our magazine continues to offer valuable Visual FoxPro articles as well as opening the door for more .Net articles. As months go by, we should have more Visual FoxPro .Net related articles as well as other .Net articles. This month, our interview with John Petersen, focuses a lot on .Net. We also have an interesting article by Mike Helland on an introduction to ASP.NET Web Forms.

This month also features an article by Fabio Vazquez on "Introducing XML for VFP Programmers". This is the second part of his series. The first part was initially introduced on RapoZine before the join took place. Fábio Vieira, co-owner of FRX2Word, has written an article on how FRX2Word works behind the scenes in Visual FoxPro. Alessandro Orlando talks about the demystification of Visual FoxPro and Winsock. Claudio Lassala continues on his series for Visual FoxPro for beginners. This is the fifth part of his series. The first four parts have been also initially introduced on RapoZine before the join took place.

As you can see, UTMag/RapoZine is doing extremely well. We received a lot of congratulating emails for our first joint issue last month. This has increased the interest of writers to participate in the magazine. The magazine continues to look for more .Net, XML and Visual FoxPro Internet related topics as well as Visual FoxPro topics in general. Send your request to participate in our magazine to either Michel or Claudio.

The Universal Thread will introduce a tutorial in the next few days. The tutorial will be useful for new members as well as for regular members. This will be offered in a form of short five minutes videos on specific topics. The videos will be prepared by Universal Thread consultants and will help to offer a good learning tool on making the best out of the Universal Thread. The videos will be available in English and Portuguese.

And, as usual, we have other nice features coming in. But, of course, we can't tell you all the secrets at the same time! ;)

Michel Fournier, Level Extreme Inc.
Michel Fournier is a professional, visionary, perfectionist, mostly known for his renowned realizations over the years, designer, architect, owner of the « Level Extreme Platform », formerly known as the « Universal Thread », recognized as one of the longest running Web sites of the planet, also known as a precursor to social networking, product manager, Internet serial entrepreneur, practiced Lean Startup techniques long before they were known, out of the box thinker, using the tenth man rule, specializes in building entire virtual data center solutions, has provided high end IT consulting worldwide, has owned and operated three companies, delivered worldwide renowned e-commerce Web sites, designed and architected two world class top level development frameworks, wrote over 100 IT articles for various sources, presented at user groups, conventions and corporations nationwide as well as in the US, has provided his contribution in political and legal issues to provide a better world, Owner and Senior IT Consultant at Level Extreme Inc., former Architect Software/Application & Project Manager, 7 times Microsoft Most Valued Professional for VB.NET, 7 times Microsoft Most Valued Professional for Visual FoxPro, Developers Choice award for best site at VFP DevCon 2000 Connections in New Orleans, featured in Acadie Nouvelle on October 2003.

Claudio Lassala, Improving
Claudio Lassala is an independent Software Developer who currently works mostly building Ruby on Rails applications. Previously, he has worked for several years developing .NET applications, presented several lectures at Microsoft events such as PDC Brazil, TechEd Europe, and various other Microsoft seminars, as well as several conferences and user groups across North America, Europe and Brazil. He is a multiple winner of the Microsoft MVP Award since 2001 (for Visual FoxPro in 2001-2002, and for C# ever since). He has articles published on several magazines, such as MSDN Brazil Magazine and CoDe Magazine. He started the Virtual Brown Bag meetings (www.virtualbrownbag.com) in 2009 and have been hosting it weekly since then. When not writing code, Claudio is probably rocking out with his band, Descent Into Madness (http://www.descentintomadness.com). In a previous life, Claudio authored and presented several training videos that can be found on the Universal Thread.
More articles from this author
Michel Fournier, February 1, 2007
From the Level Extreme .NET Framework, this small class allows a developer to manipulate easily the content of a directory by the use of a dataset. With the setup of a few properties, a call to the method and the access to the object dataset, you can have access to the file properties of the directo...
Michel Fournier, August 1, 2001
It is interesting to see how something new can evolve. This is the case for the Universal Thread Magazine. We are now at our 3rd issue and we are already overbooked by scheduled articles and hot stuff we have to cover for the upcoming issues. Publishers are sending request for book reviews, wri...
Michel Fournier, October 1, 2002
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Michel Fournier, May 1, 2006
In this article, Michel Fournier is providing a small introduction to manipulating XML data from VB.NET. The use of XML is now widely used for various purposes such as exchanging data between application, platforms and other environments. XML is a simple and very flexibile text format that can be ma...
Michel Fournier, October 1, 2001
In our daily things we do, sometimes we find ourselves in unexpected situations. Such situations, either in our personal life or from our professional work, require some adjustments in order to walk through them. The ability to take some time to take an overall look of what is happening, apply a bas...
Michel Fournier, March 1, 2007
In this small article, Michel discusses a problem he recently encountered when converting a dataset into XML to be used later on with a XSL transformation to export into an Excel sheet. When null values were present in the dataset, this was creating weird result. This article provides a quite alte...
Michel Fournier, February 1, 2006
This article discusses a simple banner fonctionalities function which can ease the display of banners on Web sites. If your Web site displays banners in GIF, JPG of Flash format, this function could be useful to you.
Michel Fournier, January 1, 2006
There are various ways to authenticate a user to a Web Service. This article discusses one way to do it by the use of Cookies. As it could the case with a Web page sending a cookie to the browser, the same can be used from within a Web Service.
Michel Fournier, February 1, 2006
This article is a follow up on the first part of this article which appeared on our January 2006 issue. In this one, Michel discussed further implementation of getting the authentication from a members table as well as setting up a session per user.
Michel Fournier, December 1, 2003
Visual FoxPro and .NET are two great environments to build business applications with. But, fantastic they are when you combine them together in order to increase the strenght of the flexibility to respond to your client needs. In this article, I will demonstrate a case study in regards to a new ser...
Michel Fournier, December 1, 2002
Over the years, I have been involved in several types of desktop and Web applications. Every time you start a new project, there is always something new you will learn. In this article, I would like to detail some of the issues which are to be considered when delivering a Web based application. Thos...
Michel Fournier, January 1, 2003
This article is a follow-up with more advanced details in regards to the first article of this series in our December issue which included a tip on dealing with stylesheets. This one allows you to customize your HTML code based on the user, assuming each user has some ways to setup some specific sty...
Michel Fournier, March 1, 2003
The first two articles of this series have been published in the issues of December 2002 and January 2003. In this one, I will talk about graphic issues, how to negotiate with a form to launch his transaction to either within the same window or a new one, how to gather values from one page to anothe...
Michel Fournier, April 1, 2003
In this article, I will proceed with considerations about HTTP server variables being received from a browser and about considerations for opening new windows in your Web application. Relying on the protocol or not When it first started, we didn't ask that question to ourselves as to know ...
Michel Fournier, April 1, 2009
This articles describes the use of CDO.Message to gain the ability to retrieve a URL as a MHT file. It also covers an interesting approach to retrieve a URL even if this one requires a login.
Michel Fournier, January 1, 2006
Data dictionaries has its use and also for Web applications. I see many developers building Web applications who forget about many structured that used to be in place when developping desktop applications. The same should apply for Web applications as it is no different. This article discusses some ...
Michel Fournier, June 1, 2003
DevTeach was held in Montreal from May 10-13, 2003. It presented a new breed of conference. Sessions included both presentation material and, whenever possible, hands-on training. DevTeach brought under the same roof the best speakers available for .NET, SQL Server and Visual FoxPro as well as Micro...
Michel Fournier, May 1, 2002
The Essential Fox conference was held this weekend in Independence, MO. Once again, the Universal Thread team was on site to do the official coverage of the event. It has been a great success, well planned by Russ Swall, the event owner, and his team and well appreciated by the attendees. A total of...
Michel Fournier, April 1, 2002
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Michel Fournier, September 1, 2001
Ever wonder how to successfully and rapidly display HTML lists to your users? Well, we all probably already did. However, its implementation differs a lot from sites to sites as we all have our own different approaches. Delivering Visual FoxPro data to the Web as if you would be in Visual FoxPro is ...
Michel Fournier, November 1, 2001
A lot of things happened recently in the Visual FoxPro world and for related technologies. The Great Lakes Great Database Workshop was being held in Milwaukee from Sunday October 27 to Wednesday October 31. That conference which primaly focused on Visual FoxPro has covered a lot of technologies...
Michel Fournier, December 1, 2002
UTMag/RapoZine team Editors Michel Fournier Claudio Lassala Co-editor Martín Salías Translation coordinators Claudio Lassala Martín Salías Translators Eduardo Vidigal Rodolfo Duarte Fábio Vazquez José Cavalcanti Moacyr Zalcman Fábio Vieira M...
Michel Fournier, November 1, 2002
UTMag/RapoZine team Editors Michel Fournier Claudio Lassala Co-editor Martín Salías Translation coordinators Claudio Lassala Martín Salías Translators Eduardo Vidigal Rodolfo Duarte Fábio Vazquez José Cavalcanti Moacyr Zalcman Fábio Vieira M...
Michel Fournier, January 1, 2003
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Michel Fournier, November 1, 2001
I have been following several threads on the Universal Thread recently about FTP from Visual FoxPro. I have used an ActiveX for a while to do such a task. I have found that years after years, the problem is that you have to maintain that ActiveX for your own workstation and for every servers or work...
Michel Fournier, July 1, 2002
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Michel Fournier, January 1, 2006
With the beginning of the new year, Michel resumes some of the highlights of the Universal Thread and what is coming up for the new season.
Michel Fournier, March 1, 2006
When comes time to display the content of a memo field on a Web page, one common task we have to do is to hyperlink specific content. This article discusses about a technique which can be used to hyperlink various types of links as well as email addresses.
Michel Fournier, April 1, 2009
This article describes some basic techniques to manipulate some images in .NET. It covers image resizing, image cropping and the ability to save an image into a JPG high resolution format.
Michel Fournier, May 1, 2007
This short articles provides an approach of important data from an Excel sheet into your application without having the requirement of having Excel installed on the server.
Michel Fournier, August 1, 2002
UTMag/RapoZine team Editors Michel Fournier Claudio Lassala Co-editor Martín Salías Translation coordinators Claudio Lassala Martín Salías Translators Eduardo Vidigal Rodolfo Duarte Fábio Vazquez José Cavalcanti Moacyr Zalcman Fábio Vieira M...
Michel Fournier, July 1, 2001
Recently, I was having problems while working on several projects on my PC. The problems were happening when I had several applications open at the same time. When the problem occured, I had to reboot my PC and then was able to work for a few hours up to a few days until the next reboot. As I was wo...
Michel Fournier, June 1, 2002
UTMag/RapoZine team Editors Michel Fournier Claudio Lassala Co-editor Martín Salías Translation coordinators Claudio Lassala Martín Salías Translators Eduardo Vidigal Rodolfo Duarte Fábio Vazquez José Cavalcanti Moacyr Zalcman Fábio Vieira M...
Michel Fournier, September 1, 2002
UTMag/RapoZine team Editors Michel Fournier Claudio Lassala Co-editor Martín Salías Translation coordinators Claudio Lassala Martín Salías Translators Eduardo Vidigal Rodolfo Duarte Fábio Vazquez José Cavalcanti Moacyr Zalcman Fábio Vieira M...
Michel Fournier, January 1, 2001
Xitech (Europe) produces tools for the Windows software developer. They specialize in FoxPro Developer tools, data and code recovery and security. In this article, we will see an overview of 5 of their tools. You will find more details about each of them from Xitech documentation. To get Xitech cont...
Michel Fournier, April 1, 2006
This article discusses the ability to use Visual FoxPro to schedule a list of tasks to be executed at specific intervals. While there could be the approach of using the Windows Scheduler to execute those tasks, it is always interesting to be able to control everything from within VFP. A small VFP sc...
Michel Fournier, April 1, 2006
This article describes an overview of sending an email from VB.NET. It covers the basis of creating the email functionality in a class and using an instance of that class to define and send the email. The class includes the ability to send to multiple recipients as well as sending attachments. Sendi...
Michel Fournier, July 1, 2002
This is a follow up on my previous article on using SOAP protocol for authentication that appeared in our December 2001 issue. That article was mentioning the use of the SOAP header for authentication such as being able to identify the user for any upcoming hit to your Web Service as soon as the Log...
Michel Fournier, May 1, 2002
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Michel Fournier, July 1, 2002
From recent discussions I had, with several persons from my team, about common patterns which occur in the evolution of the Universal Thread, I thought it would be nice to write an article about it. Basically, within the evolution of a product, there are some similitudes which are sometimes interest...
Michel Fournier, June 1, 2001
Welcome to our first issue of the Universal Thread Magazine. We kept receiving many requests to have such a media available on the Universal Thread, so we decided to release our first issue this month. Many people have mentioned an interest to either have such a magazine for the pleasure to read abo...
Michel Fournier, December 1, 2001
The Visual FoxPro Zone evolves As many of you may have seen, the Universal Thread Visual FoxPro Zone is evolving quite fast. In the last month, we added new content in it. As usual, the most popular option is the Toledo Wish List. Several entries are created every day. This is the place to co...
Michel Fournier, January 1, 2002
It's January 3rd, 2002, I am writing this editorial at 20h32 EST. The Christmas break is over but was it really a break? More and more, years after years, I keep seeing a lot of persons online during Christmas day or a few minutes before the new year. And, I mean, they are online as per their own ti...
Michel Fournier, January 1, 2004
In December 1993, a great history started when a small Web site known as the Visual FoxPro Yellow Pages started. Basically, a site providing ads for Visual FoxPro developers such as jobs and consulting services. Known also as the first Visual FoxPro site, it has evolved quite fast during the first t...
Michel Fournier, January 1, 2006
In the recent months, I have been involved in settings various projects at client sites, as well as for Level Extreme Web sites, which involved the support of uploading image files from an Internet browser. The process of supporting that capability in your application, either from a desktop of from ...
Michel Fournier, December 1, 2001
The Microsoft SOAP client provides access to any Web Service. Once the object is instantiated and the location of the WSDL file given, you are ready to go to access any method. Thus, based on what is supported by the Web Service, you can query to obtain various types of content such as string and bo...
Michel Fournier, February 1, 2002
On January 15th, 2002, an important joint took place for our magazine. The Universal Thread Magazine and RapoZine magazine, an online magazine available for the Portuguese developers community, joined to create UTMag/RapoZine. Effective from this issue, both magazines will offer the same technical c...
Michel Fournier, July 1, 2002
Show seconds in a readable format If you need to check elapsed time with seconds() or a datetime value, this function allows you to display the elapsed time in a human-readable format, that is, hours:minutes:seconds, instead of the total number of seconds. Just pass a number of seconds as...
Michel Fournier, August 1, 2002
Updating your DLL on IIS This has been a common question in the recent months on the Universal Thread. More and more, developers have the need to use a DLL under IIS. However, the fun part comes when you need to update it. As soon as it kicks in, you can't update your DLL anymore as it re...
Michel Fournier, November 1, 2002
Use MemLines() to wrap text lines When you need to wrap some text at a given width (say 75 characters per line), you do it easily with: SET MEMOWIDTH TO 75 lcMemo = lcNewMemo = "" _MLINE = 0 FOR i= 1 TO memlines(lcMemo) lcNewMemo = lcNewMemo ; + MLINE(lcMemo,1,_MLINE...
Michel Fournier, September 1, 2002
Getting image width and height Probably the most flexible way to extract the width and height of an image is by the use of the image object. All is needed is to load the image in the object and get the values from the Width and Height properties. LOCAL loImage,lnWidth,lnHeight loIma...
Michel Fournier, October 1, 2002
Extracting BMPs from general fields As a complement with last issue's article on image handling, yo can find useful this little function. If you got convinced that using general fields to handle images is a bad idea, you can decided go back to independent image files. But then you'll...
Michel Fournier, June 1, 2001
It was a year ago. The DevConnections team was holding the Visual FoxPro DevCon 2000, the SQL Server Connections and the DevCon 2000 in New Orleans, Louisiana from May 14 to 18, 2000. For the first time, attendees were able to attend sessions from more than one conference at the same time. This offe...
Michel Fournier, September 1, 2001
Is there a speed limit on the Internet? Probably not, because there is so much things we can do in a short time about delivering various type of content to the community. I remember a week ago we shared an idea about helping the promotion of user group activities around the world. A week ago it was ...