These are the texts and there are no longer bug notes.
The Timer Control is a cool little device for creating events that fire at predetermined intervals. This is a great replacement for DO...WHILE and INKEY() loops, which chew up a whole bunch of processor time while counting milliseconds. The timer control is flaky and unpredictable in VFP 3.x. The Fox team has done a great job of bringing this one under control in VFP 5 and later versions.
The timer is a control with no visible presence at runtime, but fires its Timer event at a regular, defined Interval. If you messed with this control in VFP 3 and got frustrated, give it another shot. We have to give Microsoft credit where credit is due, and they did a great job with Timer. In the original version of this book, which covered Visual FoxPro 3.0, Timer got credit for a lot of bugs—even the dreaded double-bug icon—but in later versions, it appears vastly improved.
Timers fire when the menu is dropped down. They didn't in VFP 3.0. Timers fire in toolbars. Timers fire when a form is being dragged around. Timers fire when another application window is resized, or when Fox's window is resized. Timers fire when your application displays a message box. Awesome!>The last time I used timers extensively and required reliability was in the VFP5/6 days. The HackFox I have is 3, which lists a lot of bugs.
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>Does HackFox 7 list any bugs that still exist, or explicitly say that former bugs have been fixed?
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>>In my HackFox7 they write:
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The timer is a control with no visible presence at runtime, but fires its Timer event at a regular, defined Interval. If you messed with this control in VFP 3 and got frustrated, give it another shot. We have to give Microsoft credit where credit is due, and they did a great job with Timer. In the original version of this book, which covered Visual FoxPro 3.0, Timer got credit for a lot of bugs—even the dreaded double-bug icon—but in later versions, it appears vastly improved.>>
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>>>The HackFox books list a number of circumstances where the VFP timer either misbehaves, or doesn't fire at all. IIRC API approaches avoid most of those problems.
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>>>>Is it better?
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>>>>>Below is an alternative to using the VFP timer -- it uses the Win API with all VFP code:
Groet,
Peter de Valença
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