2003 - Vol. 1 - Issue 1 - Visual FoxPro 8.0
This CODE Focus Issue takes a close look at Visual FoxPro 8.0 and all its brand new features.
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VFP 8: A Great Tool For Data-Centric Solutions
Eric Rudder talks about VFP 8.
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VFP 8: Visual FoxPro's Biggest Update Since Version 3.0
Ken Levy discusses VFP8.
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VFP 8 Feature Highlights
Visual FoxPro 8 includes numerous new features that are a direct response to the requests of VFP developers.Just reading through the "What's New" section of the documentation will take you quite a while due to large quantity of additional or changed features and commands. Let's take a brief look at just a few of the exciting new capabilities that you can put to use immediately.
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Collections are Cool!
Collections are a common way to store multiple instances of things.For example, a TreeView control has a Nodes collection and Microsoft Word has a Documents collection. Until recently, Visual FoxPro developers wanting to use collections often created their own classes that were nothing more than fancy wrappers for arrays. However, in addition to being a lot of code to write, home-built collections don't support the FOR EACH syntax, which is especially awkward when they're exposed in COM servers. Visual FoxPro 8.0 solves this problem by providing a true Collection base class.
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Event Binding in VFP 8
Visual FoxPro developers have been using an event-based methodology for a very long time.For most purposes, events are what drive the development effort. The user clicks a button, causing an event to fire, and the developer writes code to react accordingly. All of this happens very transparently and without difficulty for either party. However, from a developer's point of view, there also isn't much flexibility in this approach. But in VFP 8, event handling is changing for the better.
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Introducing the CursorAdapter Class
One of the most exciting new features of Visual FoxPro 8 is the CursorAdapter class, which provides a common interface for working with data from many different sources.Chuck takes you with him on an adventure in exploring how to use CursorAdapter to change the way you relate to data in VFP 8, whether native tables, ODBC, OLE DB, or XML.
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Structured Error Handling in VFP 8
With the introduction of Visual FoxPro 3.0, error handling in VFP changed substantially.Rather than using "on error" statements, "state of the art" error events became available. Now, 7 years later, more sophisticated error handling mechanisms take center stage as Visual FoxPro 8.0 introduces structured error handling.
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Member Classes Bring Flexibility
The new VFP 8 feature often referred to as "Member Classes" is a set of new properties and new ways to define classes that can bring much more flexibility when working with certain controls.Need to define several pages in a pageframe with different properties and settings? No problem. How about better control of grid column headers? No problem.The new VFP 8 feature often referred to as "Member Classes" is a set of new properties and new ways to define classes that can bring much more flexibility when working with certain controls.Need to define several pages in a pageframe with different properties and settings? No problem. How about better control of grid column headers? No problem.
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The VFP 8 XMLAdapter Class
Visual FoxPro 8.0 introduces a whole new way to work with eXtensible Markup Language (XML).The XMLAdapter class works with hierarchical XML, provides an object-oriented approach to working with XML data, and leverages your familiarity with tables and fields in the way it exposes the XML contents.
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My Favorite Feature
When you first begin using the new Visual FoxPro 8, you are sure to find useful new features that will make your development tasks easier.Several members of the Visual FoxPro developer community who have already worked with VFP 8 tell us their opinions of the best and most useful new features. Perhaps their answers will help guide you to some cool ideas you can put to work right away.
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VFP 8 Tips and Tricks
Some of the early adopters of VFP 8 have contributed tips for some of the new features of this exciting release.Check out their ideas, then jump into the product and try some of the new stuff. You'll find that there is much more than meets the eye, with hundreds of additions, changes, and improvements.
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Creating a Statusbar Control with VFP 8
Visual FoxPro 8 offers many new features and opportunities to make life easier.In this article Rick describes how to build a native VFP-based status bar that fixes some of the problems found in the Windows Common Control OCX version (MSCOMCTL.OCX) that ships with VFP and other development tools. This article introduces several new VFP 8 features: Collections, the Empty object, AddProperty() and BindEvents(), and shows how to integrate these new features into a useful component.