.NET Interop for Visual FoxPro Applications
This article discusses in detail how to execute code dynamically by creating code and compiling it at runtime. This is a useful feature for extending applications with user extensions or for adding support for advanced templating. The article discusses the process of compiling code and utilizing the new assembly. Also provided are classes that simplify the process and an ASP like script parser that can be plugged into any application with a few lines of code.
Accessing the Active Directory and IISAdmin objects
Active Directory is a new Microsoft Operating System service that allows a common access interface to NT system components for resource and hardware mapping. Active Directory will be prominent feature of NT 5.0, but it's implemented today for administration of IIS 4.0 and Transaction Server. This article discusses how you can access ActiveDirectory from VFP and a component that helps make the job easier.
Building a Web Data Service with Visual FoxPro
Have you ever wanted to build a remote data access mechanism into an application where you can talk to data that is coming over the Web rather than from a local or network data source? Wouldn’t it be cool if you simply pointed at a URL and could remotely execute some SQL code and return data to you on the client? In this article Rick shows how to build a generic Web Sql data service that can be used with any Visual FoxPro based Web backend and any Visual FoxPro client to provide remote data access to Visual FoxPro and ODBC datasources.
Building applications with FoxISAPI
This document contains my session notes from the Visual FoxPro DevCon '98. Discusses the basic mechanics of FoxISAPI and introduces by discussion a framework that simplifies processing requests and generating output quickly.
Building distributed Web Applications with Visual FoxPro
Tired of hearing about having to rewrite your applications with an HTML interface? Tired of the limitations of an HTML based user interface? Here's some information on how to take advantage of Visual FoxPro on both the client and the server ends of the Web for building rich distributed applications that can take advantage of the Web's architecture without HTML.
Building Large Scale Web Applications with Visual FoxPro
This document contains my session notes from Visual FoxPro DevCon '98 and discusses some of the issues involved in building a high volume Web site using a live site as an example.
Calling .Net Web Services for Data Access from Visual FoxPro
Find out how to create a .Net Web Service that serves up data in a variety of ways, then see how to consume this data with Visual FoxPro. .Net Web Services are easy to develop, debug and deploy, but consuming the data, especially with Visual FoxPro is not always as straight forward as you think. This article discusses how to pass complex data between .Net Web Services and Visual FoxPro and provides several tools to facilitate and standardize the process of building solid Web Service clients for your applications.
Calling VFP COM components from .Net
Find out how to call VFP COM components from .Net and specifically ASP.Net. The article introduces the basics of importing COM components into .Net and then referencing the component. It also touches on how to pass various types of data between VFP and .Net when import types don't work. You'll also learn how to debug COM components from ASP/ASP.Net as well as the performance implications of using VFP components in ASP.Net.
Calling Visual FoxPro COM components from Visual C++
Find out several different way of how you can access Visual FoxPro COM objects from Visual C++. This white paper describes how to use native COM IDispatch calls, using the ATL CComDispatchDriver class and using VC++ smart pointer type library imports for accessing your servers. Also includes some discussion of how VFP COM objects are implemented and some utility code useful for accessing COM objects.
Creating a Statusbar control with VFP 8
Irritated by the lack of Theme support and inconsistent behavior of the Statusbar control in MSCOMCTL.OCX? This article describes how to take advantage of a number of Visual FoxPro 8's new features to build a useful replacement to the MSCOMTL statusbar control. Besides showing off some new VFP features like collections, BINDEVENTS, the new Empty object and ADDPROPERTY, it provides a ready to use class that provides the most common functionality of the StatusBar with VFP code.
Handling long Web Requests with Asynchronous Request Processing
Running long requests on a Web server can be problematic since long requests can tie up valuable Web server resources and not give the user feedback on the operation running. In this article Rick shows a message based approach to offload long requests to application servers while providing the browser with information on progress.
Internet enabling Visual FoxPro applications
Find out how to enhance your existing Visual FoxPro applications with Internet functionality without having to do a full Web conversion. Learn how using a few simple techniques that don't require much code can spruce up exsiting applications. This document describes how to integrate Hyperlinks, Email, FTP and HTTP access, a few ways to access data on the server, use DCOM to access COM objects on the server and use RDS to connect to data over an HTTP connection.
Introducing the Visual Foxpro debugger
In version 5.0 of Visual FoxPro, the lame Debug and Trace windows of 3.0 (and earlier versions) were completely replaced with a brand-new suite of powerful debug windows. In the latest version, 6.0, not much has changed. They are still powerful, and most of us are still unfamiliar with the full range of features that they offer. In this article, I shall demonstrate these features in depth.
Manipulating the Windows Registry in Visual Foxpro
In this article, I discuss the Windows Registry, and access to the registry through Win32 API functions. I also look at the design and structure of a re-useable class library that simplifies access of the registry to an acceptable level. This will enable you to store application information in the registry routinely without having to look up the complicated syntax of the API functions.
Object-oriented menus in VFP 6.0
In this article, I use object-oriented programming in Visual
Foxpro 6.0 to go through the process of "wrapping" some of
FoxPro's older Xbase commands - specifically those dealing with
menus - in a class library.
Programming Events with the Foxpro SDK
There are a number of useful things I've always wanted to add to my FoxPro applications that I call "user independent". Like screen savers, or popup reminders, these happen independent of the user's current focus in your application. In this article I describe how to use the Foxpro SDK to add triggers to your own programs.
Using .Net Components via COM from Visual FoxPro
Find out how you can use VFP code in .NET and how to use .NET code in Visual FoxPro, in this comprehensive article that covers a number of different ways that you can integrate Visual FoxPro and .NET. The main three areas that are discussed are using the VFP OleDb provider, COM Interop both calling VFP components from .NET (and ASP.NET specifically) and calling .NET components from VFP and finally using Web Services for interop. The document points out some pitfalls and workarounds and tricks for working with data retrieved from .NET. This article is very detailed and hence fairly long at 45 printed pages.
Using Microsoft's SOAP Toolkit for remote object access
Check out how to use Microsoft's Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) toolkit to call remote functions and component methods over the Web. This paper describes how to use the toolkit and how to create and call components from Visual FoxPro as well as examples on how to create custom SOAP clients.
Using Unicode in Visual FoxPro Web and Desktop Applications
Visual FoxPro doesn’t have native Unicode support which means that you have to do some extra work and understand how the process works in order to work with it. In this article I’ll describe the issues in the context of supporting of multiple languages simultaneously, rather than through the view of code page translation which Visual FoxPro readily supports. I’ll start with an overview of the issues and how to work with Unicode in general, then show how to retrieve and update Unicode data using Visual FoxPro and SQL Server data. Finally I'll talk about how to get the Unicode content to display both in your Web and Desktop user interfaces.
Using VFP COM Objects with Active Server Pages
This document discusses how you can use Visual FoxPro COM objects in your Active Server Applications. COM is the primary mechanism employed by ASP to extend the base functionality provided by this popular Web development tool.
Using XML Data Services in distributed Applications
Find out about generic XML Data Services that can provide data directly to your client application. This article discusses the SQL 2000 XML features as well as a VFP based XML data server implementation that lets you serve VFP and ODBC data from a VFP backend application.
Visual FoxPro 7.0: Program Your Data with Powerful New COM, XML, and Web Services Support
Visual FoxPro 7.0 represents a significant improvement over version 6.0. There are many new features designed to support COM, XML, and Web Services. Now COM servers built with Visual FoxPro are more flexible and robust thanks to strong typing and the ability to implement interfaces from other type libraries. IDE features like the new object browser combine convenience and efficiency, and other language features such as event handlers and early binding to COM objects increase performance. Lastly, an enhanced session class plus several new XML functions make Visual FoxPro a great choice for Web application development.
Web reports with Adobe Acrobat Documents
Ever wanted to run a Visual FoxPro report over the Web without having to recode it in HTML or forcing it through some hokey HTML converter? Find out how you can use Adobe Acrobat's PDFWriter software to generate reports on the fly and display them on the Web. Looking like the real thing! This article discusses how it works and provides a class simplify the process.
Writing VFP apps for multiple back-end databases - a case study
In this article I discuss designing an application that supports multiple possible back-end databases, and follow the strategy in building a simple example that runs on either VFP tables or SQL Server. We will examine a few specific problems that we had, along with the solutions that we developed. Topics covered include: Creating Sample Data; Local Views; Moving data to SQL Server; Remote Views; Tuning views; View management.
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