El Zorro has another great program for you in November. That's
because Rich Simpson is a speaker at many conferences. Below is a
description of the program. This will be a good one for anyone interested
in producing great reports with more flexibility than the VFP report writer.

The meeting is FRIDAY NOVEMBER 14!

Come on out and enjoy another great El Zorro meeting!!!

Rich Simpson will be demonstrating and discussing the features and
functionality of the Mind's Eye Report Engine which he has developed
over the last couple of years. Rich will also be open to discuss any
questions and topics on software development using VFP and Delphi and
why he uses them over other languages. For those interested in building
graphically intense ActiveX controls for use in VFP applications that
don't require any MFC runtime files or any other runtime files for that
matter. Rich will demonstrate how quick and easy it is to create ActiveX
controls using Delphi. Delphi is not that much different in syntax than
using VFP. However, it allows for a much lower level of support for
processing and drawing graphics intensive controls. The good thing is
that a lot of the Windows API calls have already been wrapped up into
Delphi Classes for you to use much like MFC. Delphi makes it easy to
process Windows Messages in your code as well as write inline assembler
code if you need to. In less than 5 minutes you can create an ActiveX
control and have it running inside of VFP. You are still left with
making it do exactly what you want but without limitations or
performance hits. All Delphi applications and ActiveX controls are
compiled to machine code. There is even a Delphi .NET version coming in
the near future code name OCTANE as well as Kylix 3.0 (Delphi for Linux)
which is already shipping.

The Mind's Eye Report Engine control along with its VFP Class Library
has been designed to overcome many of the limitations of the current VFP
Report Writer as well as add many new features when running VFP Reports.
Some major design goals were to have a Report Preview surface that could
be programmatically controlled and manipulated at runtime like an Object
rather than relinquish all control over the Report Preview to VFP and
also have the ability used in the FoxPro DOS days of @ SAY and ? where
text could be printed anywhere on the page at almost any time while
still supporting FoxPro banded reports. Zooming greater than 100% was
another must have feature as well. The culmination of his efforts has
resulted in a control that supports virtually Unlimited Zoom, the
ability to concatenate and Preview multiple VFP reports of different
Page Sizes and/or Orientations into a Single Report Preview, the ability
to assign each page to a different Paper Bin, assign Watermarks to pages
via a Property, support for text searches and highlighting of text in a
Report Preview, the ability to copy single pages of a report to the
Clipboard to be pasted into other applications as well as the ability to
place objects from the Clipboard onto Report Pages as well, the ability
to add pages, text, shapes, lines, pictures, charts and barcodes to a
report programmatically at runtime. Graphs and Barcodes contained in a
report do not require any 3rd party charting tools or barcode fonts. The
Report Engine also has a built in PDF rendering engine and can save
reports to PDF documents without requiring any 3rd party PDF printer
drivers or tools. All Report Pages can be combined into a single PDF
document or printed as a single document as one print job. Report pages
can even be saved as Bitmap, JPEG or Metafile images as well. Emailing
reports is also made easy with its built in support for both SMTP and
MAPI email. All of the features of the Report Engine can be used with or
without a GUI so things can be done programmatically as well as
presented to the user. The control can also be used in VB, Delphi or C++
as well since it is data independent.


El Zorro