Keeping up to date with technology

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...

In our day to day work, it is not easy to keep up to date with the technology. For me, that update is now saving me about 20 minutes per day. I should have done it before. Sometimes, we don't want to take the time to update specific components in our setup but the time taken to do it may be a big time saver at long term.

Second issue of Universal Thread Magazine

This month features our second issue of the Universal Thread Magazine. As many of you have read it in our first issue, we delivered some interesting articles about related topics covered by the Universal Thread. We received many good comments about the magazine. Many persons have requested information on how to be a writer. We are always happy to receive articles for upcoming issues. If you wish to write about an article which can be spreaded across multiple months, feel free to do it as well. Our content includes high end technical articles, Frequently Asked Questions, monthly profiles, conference coverages and other topics. See what is best for you and let us know what you wish to contribute.

Universal Thread interface

Most of you, who have logged in in the last month, have seen the new Universal Thread interface for the messages area. We would like to take this opportunity to talk a little about it. Such a change, especially when manipulating components that users are frequently working with on their day to day tasks, requires a good justification before being applied as well as a good analysism of the impact at short and long term. Our previous version, in the term of its overall aspect, has been used for about two years. Sometimes, for the ongoing evolution of the application and the product itself, such change is necessary. In the recent months, we received many comments from members who had difficulties using the previous interface. We summarized the common requests in order to focus more on them as well as any other good feedback we received.

Such requests have been made to have a more Windows like interface. Some others have been made on the previous frameset which was having vertical frames on the left side which was confusing some users. Some other comments have been made about real estate and related topics.

The new interface, as any changes you might apply in an interface design, requires a small learning curve. So far, we received a lot of common from members who expressed the fact that it was a change at first but as soon as they got use to it, they became more productive with the overall aspect of the messages area. It is also a question of using a good tool for the job as I mention in the introduction of this editorial. For us, it is extremly difficult to support older browsers as we have to move ahead with technology by providing advanced features requested by the users. We deploy our interface for the Internet Explorer browser. The interface might work for other browsers but may offers some disalignments and non functional features.

Basically, the new interface offers a more Windows style approach, a better real estate, smaller graphical download of items thus faster to get in the messages area and a common toolbar for all members as well as keeping the ability to customize your own icons and related features.

Continue to forward us your suggestions for any other features you would like to have. We are constantly working on the evolution of the Universal Thread to offer you the best tool as we can.

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.

A class to read directory files

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...

A good start

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...

A new line of support

Michel Fournier, October 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...

A small XML class

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...

Adjusting yourselves to unexpected situations

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...

Avoiding null values when converting to XML

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...

Banner functionalities for your Web site

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.

Basic Web Service authentication model

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.

Basic Web Service authentication model - Part II

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.

Breaking the barrier between VFP & .NET

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...

Considerations when building Web applications

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...

Considerations when building Web applications Part II

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...

Considerations when building Web applications Part III

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...

Considerations when building Web applications Part IV

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 ...

Creating a MHTML file from a URL

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.

Data dictionary and the validation

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 ...

DevTeach, a great success for a first event!

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...

Essential Fox summary report

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...

Expanding the magazine to the Spanish community

Michel Fournier, April 1, 2002

UTMag/RapoZine team Editors Michel Fournier Claudio Lassala Translation coordinators Claudio Lassala Martín Salías Translators Eduardo Vidigal Rodolfo Duarte Fábio Vazquez Claudio Rola José Cavalcanti Moacyr Zalcman Ricardo Soares Fábio Vieira ...

Fournier Transformation List

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 ...

From GLGDW to PDC to The History of Visual FoxPro

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...

From the community

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...

From the community

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...

From the community

Michel Fournier, January 1, 2003

UTMag/RapoZine team Editors Michel Fournier Claudio Lassala Co-editor Martín Salías Translation coordinators Claudio Lassala Martín Salías Translators Rodolfo Duarte Fábio Vazquez Moacyr Zalcman Martín Salías Antonio Castaño Fabián Belo Rafae...

FTP from Visual FoxPro

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...

Get ready for the UT VFP Worldwide Tournament!

Michel Fournier, July 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...

Happy new year!

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.

Hyperlinking your memo fields

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.

Image manipulation in .NET

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.

Import from Excel

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.

Instant training provides some great advantages!

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...

Light up the candles!

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...

One Community - Many events

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...

Overview of Cryptor, Refox, COMPAxiON, FoxFix and XiLights

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...

Scheduling Visual FoxPro tasks

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...

Sending email from VB.NET

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...

SOAP 3 to the rescue

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...

The Community Speaks

Michel Fournier, May 1, 2002

UTMag/RapoZine team Editors Michel Fournier Claudio Lassala Translation coordinators Claudio Lassala Martín Salías Translators Eduardo Vidigal Rodolfo Duarte Fábio Vazquez José Cavalcanti Moacyr Zalcman Fábio Vieira Martín Salías Antonio Castañ...

The evolution of a product

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...

The First Issue of the Universal Thread Magazine

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...

The Visual FoxPro Zones evolves

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...

To the New Year!

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...

Universal Thread: 10 Years Serving The Developers Community

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...

Upload a file from the browser

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 ...

Using SOAP header for authentication

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...

UTMag/RapoZine for the community

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...

UTMag/RapoZine Shortcuts

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...

UTMag/RapoZine Shortcuts

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...

UTMag/RapoZine Shortcuts

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...

UTMag/RapoZine Shortcuts

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...

UTMag/RapoZine Shortcuts

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...

VS Connections

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...

Where's the speed limit?

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 ...

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...