“Topics for Everyone”
Presented by Marcia Akins and Andy Kramek
Authors and Conference Speakers
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1. Optimizing Your Code - Andy
As we all know, Visual FoxPro provides an extremely rich and varied development environment but sometimes too much of a good thing leads us into bad habits. When writing code there are usually several ways of achieving the same result, but all too often there are significant differences in performance. Internationally recognized VFP Consultant and Trainer, Jim Booth, offers this advice: "to improve your application's performance, all you have to do is take out the slow bits". In this session Andy explores what constitutes "a slow bit", how you find and what you can do about it.
2. Event Handling in VFP - Marcia
VFP 7 gave us the ability to implement interfaces. This, together with the EventHandler() function, allowed us to run our VFP code when events fired in automation servers. Successive versions of Visual FoxPro have extended the capabilities of developers to interact directly with the product culminating in Version 8.0 with the introduction of the BindEvent() function which gives direct access to the VFP Event Model. Version 9.0 has exposed even more of Visual FoxPro's event model and allows even greater control and interaction. In this session Marcia shows how you can put the event handling capabilities of VFP to use in your applications.
3. Data Buffering and Transactions - Andy
In this session Andy de-mystifies the Visual FoxPro implementation of data buffering, investigates the causes of, and how to resolve, data update conflicts and concludes by taking a fresh look at transactions. Now that VFP 9.0 has finally extended transactions to include both free tables and cursors, transactional processing is much easier to implement and there is no reason not to include it as an integral part of any application that is handling VFP data.
4. Modeling Hierarchies - Marcia
Being able to model parent - child - grandchild relationships in Visual FoxPro is a task with which we developers are quite familiar. The traditional approach has been to create parent, child, and grandchild tables that are linked using foreign keys. This approach works quite well when the hierarchy is symmetrical. However, it is inflexible and falls apart when the hierarchy is asymmetrical (that is, a given branch may skip a level in the hierarchy). In this session, Marcia demonstrates an alternate approach to modeling hierarchies that is much more flexible because it separates the data from the structure of the hierarchy.
5. Introduction to the VFP 9 Report Writer – Marcia and Andy
One of the biggest reasons that version 9 of Visual FoxPro is such a compelling upgrade is the major improvements that have been made to the report writer. In this session, Marcia and Andy give you an overview of these new features which include reusable data environments, report protection, UI enhancements, data group enhancements, multiple detail bands and extensibility using the new object assisted reporting features.