Rahul Desai's Blog

Blog moved to new location

rahul@nationalcom.com (Rahul Desai) — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 15:57:20 -0700

I have moved my blog to the new location

http://www.nationalcom.com/wordpress

The location remains the same (my web site http://www.nationalcom.com ), changed from Serendipity to WordPress.

The new Official Ambassador of Visual Foxpro

rahul@nationalcom.com (Rahul Desai) — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 02:42:57 -0700

Just quickly making an announcement (you might already know it by now), Craig Bailey is now a MVP for Microsoft Visual Foxpro. Well, he should have been granted a MVP long back....just amazed the way he promotes VFP day after day, month after month and yes, year after year.

I would have to say, Craig Bailey and Andrew Coates share the credit for holding the VFP community together here in Australia.

Looking forward to yet another session of SVFPUG at the end of this month.

Congratulations Craig Bailey, on your achievement...Proud to be a part of your team.

SQL DownUnder 2006- Wagga Wagga

rahul@nationalcom.com (Rahul Desai) — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 02:23:39 -0700

I was at the SQL DownUnder CodeCamp, SQL server conference at Wagga Wagga, Australia, hosted at the scenic Campus of Charles Sturt University. I was just amazed at the new possibilites with SQL server 2005. We had quiet a few MVP's present at the conference and getting some quick tips from them was just terrific. Some new MVP's from Australia were also introduced during the conference. Here is a quick link to the Website http://www.sqldownunder.com/CodeCamp/tabid/53/Default.aspx , hopefully the presentation material should be available on the website within next few days.

I was specifically impressed by few session from :

1. Peter Myers - An introduction to data mining in SQL Server 2005

2. Itzik Ben Gan - Cursors vs Set-Based Queries Part A & Part B

3. Adam Cogan - 12 Tips for Better Reporting Services (Infact it was around 17 tips!).

Adam Cogan was particularly generous as he was giving away nice Cofee Mugs at the Cost of your Business Card, infact he ran out of stock after the first session of the conference and he was back with more stock the second day. Amazing how much Coffee Mugs are popular in Australia.

Unluckly, we missed last few sessions as we had to catch an afternoon flight back to Sydney.

Also had a chance to have a quick chat with Dr Greg Low, the organizer of the conference, I asked him how many presentations does he do in a year, and was just amazed by the answer that followed....just amazing how you can manage to learn so much, share so much and that too with lots of energy.

VFP addon tools....

rahul@nationalcom.com (Rahul Desai) — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 02:06:18 -0700

I got a chance to present few VFP add-on tools at the Sydney VFP users group this 28th June 2006. May be it can benefit many others as well. The tool I discussed were:

FoxMasters Macros ( http://www.foxmasters.com/ )
FoxMasters Code Inspector ( http://www.foxmasters.com/ )
Project manager, a nice little utility to maintain multiple projects on click of a key (http://www.nationalcom.com/downloads/utility/pm.app )
Project documentation Machine, a nice project documentation utility for VFP projects (http://gorila.netlab.cz/_pdm.html )

These are nice tools which can help you in:

Enhancing your VFP integrated development environment
Enhance your productivity
Helps you in standardizing the way you code across various project
Also helps in maintaining coding standards up to an extent.

More tools next time....

Web browser compatibility with VFP applications

rahul@nationalcom.com (Rahul Desai) — Sun, 07 May 2006 03:46:29 -0700

I am about to discuss a very important aspect on one of the Key features of Visual Foxpro which has been stripped without much of a fuss. Yes, I am talking about the browser compatibality of the VFP applications.

Had anyone had a change to use ActiveDoc class in VFP? How many are even actually aware about this? There are a very few who had a chance to use this. Actually it was all about converting your existing VFP application to run from within Internet explorer rather than running it as a Desktop application. And all this could be done in few quick easy steps.

1. Add the ActiveDoc class to your application

2. Run your main program from within the RUN event of the created class object

3. CLEAR EVENTS on the container RELEASE event

4. Set the ContainerReleaseType=1

5. Set the ole object as the MAIN Program

6. Rebuild project

Yes, thats it, and your current VFP application runs right from within a Web browser. It used to support IE 4.0 and above.

There were a few other form based properties which were required to be set, so that the feel and look gets converted to a browser based application rather than a common Desktop based application.

Now, this was all available in VFP 6.0 and 7.0, and it was all part of it. It just disappeared starting VFP 8.0.

I had a chance of discussing this with some of the Microsoft VFP key guys (Email communication) and the reason quoted was "The feature and compatibility had to be removed because of the security concerns involving IE". !!!!!!!!

Only later did I realise that there was Dot Net coming into the big Picture and (Dot Net was getting introduced roughly around the same time)......... well nothing much left to comment here!

VFP is known for its excellent backward compatibility, and this was one of the very good feature (or might be the only feature) which was stripped of VFP without much debate.

It was hard for me to believe a small patch not being developed to overcome a security concern (if at all required...), and that too when we have patches coming up every few weeks (may be days).

Do we really need to degrade something to upgrade something????

Can you just imagine all the current VFP applications getting converted to browser based environment with just a few minor changes? Imagine the impact it can have on all those current applications which people have started to re-develop using some other technology. We all talk about OOPS, Inheritance, Re-usability and what not.....

More on this in my next blog.....please do send me your comments on this at rahul@nationalcom.com

Project documentation utility for VFP projects

rahul@nationalcom.com (Rahul Desai) — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 02:55:54 -0700

A nice project documentation utility for VFP projects, its all free..thanks to the developers (Martin Jindra & Martin Haluza)..here is the link

http://www.eqeus.com

Send an encouraging email to developers if you find it interesting and helpful.

VFP frontend for a SNMP / TCP-IP based application....

rahul@nationalcom.com (Rahul Desai) — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 01:27:30 -0700

I just had a chance to work on an amazing project during my last assignment. It was an application to manage large datacenter, manage datacenter onsite as well as off site. We always think VFP as a good tool for developing commercial applications, but when I joined the Project with Mr. Alan North of Norlinx Inc., North Carolina, USA, I was just amazed by the boundless possibilities with VFP. Yes, the entire application to manage large datacenters was developed in VFP, and it supported multiple backends, VFP local database, SQL server and Oracle, all of them on a single application, with the feature of changing the backend on a click of a mouse. It was one of the best projects I have ever worked on in my life. I had a chance to write the entire Oracle backend part of it and manage the entire product for a period of 9 months. Even now when I run this product on my laptop I feel proud of myself being a part of this project. The product can be reviewed and downloaded at http://www.norlinx.com . The initial work on the product was done by Alan North the owner of the company and Doug Ringly. The entire project was more of a tight integration of VFP with Active-X control like SNMP, TCP-IP, WINNT-Security and what not...

So its not just commercial applications which VFP can handle, Web based, TCP-IP based, SNMP based, multiple backends......the possibilities are endless. Its your imagination which counts. Just imagine, integrate and implement...its all there to explore.

A nice easy question, how many applications do you know which supports multiple backends, and can change the backends on click of a mouse, just no major configuration required, and which is used by major industry players to control on an average around 1500 ISP equipments (Servers, routers, Temperature control units, Power control units and what not.....), and which can control the entire show onsite as well as offsite, and sends out critical alerts on the Data center status to your inbox or on your mobile in the form of a SMS?

Guys, all this we did on VFP, yes VFP, isnt it amazing?

VFP as Front end for Desktop development..

rahul@nationalcom.com (Rahul Desai) — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 15:27:23 -0700

VFP is the best Front end development tool for Desktop development. I have worked on tools like VB, Delphi, C++, Pascal etc., but when it comes to commercial application development I have always found VFP (Visual FoxPro), has an edge above all of them.

In 1998, I had a huge target project, to convert an existing DOS based accounting system to Windows platform, it was a multi module accounting system and had a large customer base. I started development in Delphi as the current DOS system was developed in PASCAL(???) and I thought if I use Delphi (it uses Pascal as its language, it supports Pascal!!!) I will have less conversion issues to face. I developed Nominal ledger module in 4 months time and eventually had to scrap it because of lots of issues, including ODBC, Multi users, Built in functionality not available etc..., infact I remember I had to write custom controls to do every bit of checking, Numeric entry, Date validations etc. Although the current version of Delphi might be supporting all this basic required functionality, Delphi 2.0 did not.

Next, I shifted to Visual Basic 5.0 thinking, VB5 being a popular language will definately support such basic features, it did and we were rolling until it came to VB6. There were a lot of functional, Syntactical changes which forced us to rewrite most of our code!!!!! I had previously worked on FoxPro for DOS and Windows, I never ever had such conversion issues, the only reason I was avoiding it was because of "HYPE" about it not being a good Visual programming language. I did a small test project and found out that it supported all the requirements and conversion to higher versions was literally transparent, and since then it has been VFP all the way. I have successfully designed and developed a bunch of applications using VFP as front end and SQL Server, Oracle, VFP local database, Paradox and now MySQL as Backends. Its just amazing how easy it is to develop and maintain.

I would prefer and suggest VFP as the front end development tool for everyone's Desktop development requirements, its just amazing.