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Posts Tagged Codeplex

Finally… Sedna

Jan 27

Posted by Tod McKenna in Software Development

Some exciting news this weekend for the VFP community: Sedna has been released. Craig Berntson, Kevin Cully, and others have already blogged about it. Sedna contains some very exciting and interesting components:

  • VistaDialogs4COM - a collection of COM-visible classes that wrap the functionality provided by the Microsoft VistaBridgeLibrary which will provide access to the Windows Vista TaskDialog and Common Dialogs
  • Upsizing Wizard - excellent enhancements include bulk insert support, performance improvements, UI improvements, and support for table names with spaces
  • Data Explorer - lots of improvements including better drag and drop support and for showplans
  • NET4COM - a collection of COM classes that wrap a subset of the .NET Framework 2.0
  • MY for VFP - similar to NET4COM, MY is a native implementation which makes available many new functions for VFP developers
  • DDEX for VFP - The Data Designer EXtensions allow Visual Studio to work better with Visual FoxPro data sources

Now that the release is out, I plan to start using and experimenting with the various components (something I had decided to do ‘later’ rather than ’sooner’). It will be fun to see how others are making use of these as well!

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VFPBuild to build Visual FoxPro Applications Using MSBuild

Nov 5

Posted by Tod McKenna in Software Development

As I mentioned last week, I have been using MSBuild for some time now to build and deploy complex data warehousing applications. Many parts of this project involve Visual FoxPro. I wrote that I had not yet experimented doing builds with VFP using MSBuild. Alan Stevens quickly pointed me towards his CodePlex project “VfpMsBuildTarget” (aka:VFPBuild).

The goals of the project are simple:

  1. Provide a GUI for including projects/files in a scheduled build, and set their appropriate properties
  2. Create a VFP build target to be used by the MSBuild engine, the build system found in Visual Studio.

While the first goal might be a ways off, the second is close to being complete.

I had a chance to look at this project, test it, debug it a little, and compile a short list of improvements I would like to see (or add myself through CodePlex). The bugs were minor and easy to fix, and my list of improvements is pretty short. It should be noted that the body of work gone into this Task already is excellent. With little effort, I was able to get it going. And with a little more effort, it can be used in production. Note: Before you can have a go at it, you will need to compile vfpprojectbuilder.dll in VFP and VfpBuild.dll in C#.

Documentation

We’ll need some documentation. Alan knows this (and has promised some soon). Even without though, I made it through with little problem. I think I am at an advantage because I (a) know VFP well, (b) know C# well, and (c) know MSBuild well. We would need instructions on how to compile the dlls as well as how to construct the MSBuild XML. If you’re new to MSBuild, you might struggle with setting up the xml. For a simple test, here is a sample screenshot. I would have provided the code but the XML would have been eaten alive by the browser:

Visual FoxPro MSBuild VFPBuild sample


To execute the above, your cmd would look similar to the following:

C:>msbuild projectx.msbuild

Functionality

It doesn’t seem to be too much effort to add support for lRebuildAll, lShowErrors, and lBuildNewGUIDs of the project.build() method. Other than that, it gives you the ability to set build options and to specify a project to load.

From Here

I would like to see goal #2 of this project buttoned up soon. I have a production environment (actually, a few) that could really utilize a stable assembly like this. The build I downloaded was a bit buggy (there were references to class properties that did not exist, for example this.nLevel and this.nBuildAction). Fixing these, plus some enhanced bullet-proofing (defensive coding) and documentation would get us there I believe.

I’ll post more as I go. For now, you can get the active VFPMSBuildTarget project files here.

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MapPoint, GDIPlusX, and EXIF Metadata

Sep 11

Posted by Tod McKenna in Software Development

Over at Geeks and Gurus, Steve Bodnar has been blogging about Fox Forward. If you haven’t seen his blog, take a look for some more insight into Fox Forward.

I loved Steve’s session on MapPoint. MapPoint integration might be my first session-to-realworld application: If not for production, for curiosity. (A Fox Trails experiment might be second.) Most of my VFP experience has been with municipal data (parcels, properties, buildings, addresses, etc) and MapPoint offers some interesting possibilities.

Bo showed us how we might embed our own custom EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) metadata into JPEG files using GDIPlusX. I’d like to experiment using a JPEG of a house as a portable data file, storing the house’s address as EXIF metadata and then using MapPoint to show me where it is on a map.

I’ll keep you all posted with my progress!

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Under rock? SP2 and Sedna betas released.

Jun 19

Posted by Tod McKenna in Software Development

Others have blogged about this already, but just in case you use my humble blog for all your Visual FoxPro news and announcements (a man can dream, can’t he?), Microsoft has released FoxPro 9 Service Pack 2 and its “Sedna” extensions in beta.

Enjoy!

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CoDe’s Sedna Issue

Mar 2

Posted by Tod McKenna in Reviews

I got my Sedna issue of CoDe magazine the other day, and just finished reading through it. I was a little excited when it came in, and was rather pleased with the content. This was their third Fox Focus issue (why not more?). Articles by Doug Hennig, Bo Durban, Rick Schummer, Rick Strahl and others dove right into some of Sedna’s great new improvements. Although most of the content wasn’t “new” — in that I, like most VFP developers, have known about these wonderful enhancements for some time. But it is great to see them in print, in an issue especially designed for Fox.

I do admit that I skimmed over the VFP to .net stuff. I’m just not interested in porting my VFP applications to .net. Whenever I read through these sorts of things I just find myself frustrated, puzzled, and dismayed all at once. First, moving to .net would require a complete re-write. Second, I’ve developed a few .NET apps in my day and still feel that VFP (for many projects) is light years ahead of .net. Of course, I’m excited about the new C# (my .net language of choice), the cool features of the Development Studio, and LINQ. But for a Fox Focus issue, it would have been great to umm… focus more on Fox! But I digress..

Now that I have that off my chest, I’d like to comment on a few of the articles I found most interesting. First I was really happy to see Rick’s article “Visual FoxPro Web Services Revisited”. Rick gives us the goods on the Web Service Client process, ASMX, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and the status of SOAP. Communicating with the Web has never been fully straightforward in VFP, but with a little guidance and shove once in a while, future VFP development using Web Services looks bright.

Craig Boyd (”Welcome to the Future of Deployment”) and John M. Miller (”Integrating VFP into VSTS Team Projects”) show us how to use some of Visual Studio’s coolest features with VFP. Craig discusses ClickOnce — a deployment technology allowing you to do installs and upgrades on the Web — and how you can use it with VFP. This is a must read for anyone looking to update their distribution strategy. The company I just started working for is just beginning to do Web installs (after years of mailing CDs). This is one of the first articles I’ll be showing management.

Miller’s article really took me by surprise. Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) is Microsoft’s SDLC tool integrated into Visual Studio 2005. Although I haven’t used it in the past, this article sparked my interest. VSTS promises to help manage the often difficult task of integrating resources on complex projects. The only problem is that VSTS is a .net thing, and really not designed to use non-dotnet tools out of the box. However, as John explains, you can use VSTS extensibility features to make it happen. Thanks John!

Lastly, this issue is packed with little sidebars and tidbits. Things like ClassBrowserX, Scrollable containers for VFP, and GDIPlus-X. I think this issue has also inspired me to join CodePlex and maybe jump on one of the VFP projects (at least as a tester).

Take a look for more: http://www.code-magazine.com/focus/index.aspx

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