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John, This is baloney. All of the vfp web stuff is new to a lot of people since MS has not been pushing it. Example: accessing SQl or network .vfp. databases from a web service.
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Two points. First - web services are not new. The SOAP Toolkit has been around for years. And while MS billed VFP 7 as a way to leverage web services - you could take advantage of web services in VFP 6. Second - is VFP a best of breed tool for web services?

Lets delve a bit further into the current FPA issue. Here are some of the topics covered:

Auto-incrementing Fields (do you really need an article on this?)
Using sys(2015) for an alias
Using VFP App Wizard
Using Internet Explorer with your VFP Applications

If you go through prior issues of FPA or FoxTalk for that matter - there is a good deal of recycled material.

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No place is it mentioned in MS documentation that you can do this by setting up a COM+ package. And this is just one of many very basic examples regarding .vfp. web programming.
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Or write your web services in .NET. I agree that there is interesting work to the extent that some talented people can get Fox to stand on its head. But - it requires much more labor than should be necessary to accomplish those tasks. Interesting does not necessarily mean utility.


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Why Foxpro Advisor and FoxTalk don't publish more articles on this, I'll probably never know for sure.
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A lot of Fox developers could care less about COM Components or web development. When it comes to debugging com components - only a small % of Fox developers would care. And that is but one reason why MS never expended the effort to get it done. And the people that may have leveraged COM Components some years ago - many I suspect have moved on. Magazines like FPA have to balance material for novice, intermediate, and expert users. It is hard to do however in the span of barely 40 pages however. When the magazine first came out - it was nearly 80 pages long.


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Part of it, no doubt, are that not enough people are writing about it.
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Definitely part of it - and that gets to my assertion of apathy. Less people care about writing about Fox. But even if the piece were written - there is no guarantee it would be publishes given the constraints I enumerated above.

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Then again, many are publishing these types of articles for free on their web sites. For example Rick Strahl and Maurice de Beijer. Maurice has done breakthrough vfp work in creating a tool for debugging vfp COM objects with hardly any attention being given to it.
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It is great people are doing this. And definitely - Rick has been one of the most giving of free material. When you write - you have to do it for the love of writing - that is why I do it. At $100 per page - you definitely don't do it for the $.


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It all comes back to what Ken and Microsoft are pushing. If they push different technologies and won't recognize the innovative work going on in vfp then the vfp mags are not going to publish anything about it either...
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True - but it has been no secret that MS will not push Fox for many years. If MS does not promote/support the product - it will die. In this case - the death is a slow one. As you choke off the amount and significance of innovation - there is less to write about.

Claude - my basic point was that there is and has been alot of re-cycled material published in FPA and FoxTalk. If you look through the past 5 years or so - I think you will agree. One more example - 4 years ago, I wrote a series of articles that deeply analyzed Outlook and how you could use it in your Fox Applications. About a year ago or so - the topic was again in the FoxTalk pages.

< JVP >