>
>I think if they got a bunch of e-mail/letters saying "Hey Visual FoxPro is great! Wake up!", they might even be inclined to publish one of the letters or maybe even write a little article about VFP. Would a little free advertsing be nice?
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>Joe

Here's the letter I wrote, entitled FoxPro What Number?

Hank


Steve Bass in the Jan. 98 issue takes "FoxPro 2.01" to task for not handling the century issue. I'm sure you have received a number of articles pointing out that it was FoxBase 2.01. FoxPro arrived in 1990, I think, with version 1.0. It handled the century issue just fine; and would have run the FoxBase 2.01 source code if Mr. Bass had cared to do that.

Considering that Visual FoxPro is Microsoft's only object-oriented production environment for business programming (neither VB nor Access is OO), that it has been well ahead of the rest of the Microsoft stable (and the rest of the database world) in data handling (ADO cursorset code was taken from VFP, some 2 years after we had it in VFP 3), and considering that VFP alone, among all the development environments available today, is capable of handling all 3 tiers of a robust 3-tier business model -- considering all the above, the lack of attention to VFP, and the mistaken hits made on it (but then the Gartner Group doesn't get penalized for being wrong), have made this type of innocent mistake by Mr. Bass more galling than it otherwise would have been.

As for it taking hours for designing the screens in FoxBase -- apparently Mr. Bass misplaced his copy of Scrimage, the 3rd party screen designer used back in the good old days. With Scrimage what he describes would have been a 10 minute chore -- and that with a 1988 product. He surely couldn't have been talking about Visual FoxPro, which has wizards to create the simple kinds of forms (including lists from multiple tables, with calculated fields) he describes. For that matter, using any of the 3rd-party data dictionary-based frameworks in VFP (all of them written in VFP -- this is a powerful product), creating a one-to-many form with list-based record addition, editing, and referential integrity enforced deletes with customizable RI rules, in addition to List-based selection with filtering as well as filtered deletes, would take no longer than it took him to create the simple forms in Approach. To use the vernacular, VFP will eat Mr. Bass's Approach with all the Salsa he can put on it.

If Mr. Bass or other of your columnists have questions about VFP, they may want to visit the 3 very active user-based forums: microsoft.public.fox.programmer.exchange@msnews.microsoft.com); Compuserve (VFox); or the Universal Thread (http://www.levelextreme.com). The chance to help get the facts straight before they are published would be a real treat.

regards,

Hank Fay
[Professional Office Systems Plus]
Using Visual FoxPro: Microsoft's Object-Oriented Production Environment