Visual FoxPro Optimal - By Steve Davis

Welcome to my Visual FoxPro blog, I am going to teach you some smart tips and tricks that the Pros use to develop and manage FoxPro applications. If you think you already know FoxPro well, or just a beginner, I know you will find something in here that will whet your appetite for more.

Personally I think Microsoft should bring back FoxPro, when I have enough followers, I'll approach Microsoft with all your electronic requests.

Just to give you a little taste of my development skills, I develop in C,C++,.NET, Pascal, Fortran, PHP,ASP,Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and not forgetting wonderful FoxPro :-)

I will be giving away free, yes FREE code for applications, that has taken me years to develop or acquire, stuff that I have personally used to built applications. If you intend to use it commercially, feel free to make a donation, so that I can continue to provide free content for all of you to benefit. If you have a particular optimisation problem (Oh I love those ones), please leave a comment, and I'll see if I can help you out, or point you in the right direction.

I can tell you that in my professional career, FoxPro (DOS and Visual) has enabled me to earn hundred of thousands of £££, and helped me to work in the following industries:

Financial, logistics, distribution, retail, electronic, data management and direct mail.

FoxPro has been utilised in many others industries, but this blog is about my experience, so I will be focusing on just these for now.

While there are many other new languages available in the software world, FoxPro has been one of the best prototyping and delivery languages to date. In my mind, there simply has never been a more flexible language that offers Windows forms and fast database connectivity under one hood. Their famous Rushmore coding has proven to be a lifesaver when manipulating large datasets.

FoxPro has been used for some fantastic things such as web page and content management. I'll be showing you later on how this can be achieved. Remember a good developer is not only a person who can solve a computing problem, s/he is someone who is a collector of code, knowing that they might come across a problem in the future, that would save themselves hours if not days of debugging and testing.

I love FoxPro, and while Microsoft may have pulled the plug, i.e. not releasing a newer version, (please see the Microsoft website to find out why) there are many companies still using FoxPro because of its flexibility. It has long been known that a true FoxPro developer is a special breed of developer who can always find a way to solve problems using the command set without having to go to another language. The statement holds true, ..."As Wise As a FoxPro".

OK, first a little bit of quick history about FoxPro, I have been using FoxPro since its inception:

FoxPro 2.5
DOS (All you peps that came from dBase, you know who you are should love Fox)

FoxPro 2.6
DOS (Mouse control oh yeah)

FoxPro 3.0
Windows (hmm ok, I like forms, but a little buggie)

FoxPro 5.0
Windows (Stable)

FoxPro 6.0
Windows ( Needed service pack )

FoxPro 7.0
Windows ( Did not like it, seemed to flaky, intellisense ...hmm ok this could be interesting)

FoxPro 8.0
Stable love this version

FoxPro 9.0
Many dynamic reporting features, .NET accessing

Come back soon, I'll be posting code and updates,

Best Wishes

Steve Davis








FoxPro is the copyright of Microsoft Corporation.