Hi Grigore -----Original Message----- From: Grigore Dolghin [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2010 3:41 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: An interview I gave for MarketWatch
Well, as far as I am concerned, I would have preferred to have a partial port of VFP project to VFP.NET than having VFP dead now. Some would not agree with "dead" and I would like to explain my point of view. Although I am well aware about VFPX, I still consider that VFP is dead or dying because any VFPX addon would run on the existing VFP.exe code base. And as long that code base is not updated/upgraded, any addon will have the same fate. In other words: yes, I know we can write addons for report designer and use them. But we will never be able to do drill-down reports using VFP report designer. So if a customer requests that, I am forced to use something else, not VFP. Same thing happens if I need to join column headers two by two (Excel cell merge like). I hope I was clear in what I meant (my English sometimes is kind of rusty) - as long as VFP engine isn't updated, all we can do is to do some facelifting to existing VFP apps, but no fundamental changes. Have a look at this screenshot: http://www.class-software.eu/screenshot.png Well, that one is simply not doable in VFP. I need fast data access, but I also need themes, office 2010-like UI, a good reporting system which allows me to drill down the data, a native way to connect to SQL Server (such as MySQL's Connector.NET, written in C# and provided with source code, not that lousy ODBC which truncates BigInt columns to 254 chars if you don't specify a switch, and also maps MySQL calculated fields - such as Concat(FirstName, LastName) to a general field in VFP and I can't stop it doing that because I have no access to source code) and so on. I beg to differ here :) As far as reporting is concearned at least, there are absolutely no limits any more in any conceivable respect. Have look at www.report-sculptor.com It lets you build your own OOP reporting model as you wish. For instance you can build specialised classes for multy-band report types, for plain lists, grouped reports, multicolumn, but also have completely free compositions in terms of report/data flow. You get full control over everything. DrillDowns have been possible since long time ago, by commercial products (eg. Xfrx,Stonefeld,FoxFire) whereas with ReportScultor they will be taken to whole new level, where you can call not only another report (which calls 3rd,4th), but any form (or anything else) you wish. I am planning also to have baloon tool-tips enabled, where user can hoover over a report figure and then baloon (text) is shown to explain what that figure represent for instance. Also hyperlinking reports, internal report linking, content tree (bookmarks), report commenting (editable sections) etc. I showed some of this possibilities on last year FoxPro DevCon in Prague http://www.microsoft.com/cze/events/archive/2009/devcon/ Download session material of a session# FOX32 or FOX33 and have look at picture 11. There it is all shown in action. RS has its own page/report creation engine (independent from FRX) that you can use as you wish, and when you it at your disposal then very few limits apply ;) I do agree that time is slowly running out for FoxPro, but I am not consider it dead (not so ever!) nor planning to give-up on it any time soon. It is all matter of perception. Industry simply needs that kind of (as JohnK calls it) 'screwdriver', so I would not be surprised to see some NET reincarnation of Fox (written in Boo or something like that) in not so distant future. (And don't get surprised if it comes from M$ either!) Only reason that this did not happen already, is that VFP9 itself is extremely good and does not have any real problems so many people simply stick with it. In other words; FoxPro Still Rocks! Cheers :) Sergio _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
