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| Copyright |
San Diego, CA, September 9-12, 2001
Keynote
by Michel Fournier
The keynote off Monday was focusing a lot of the Visual FoxPro marketing. "Working closer to the community" has been the message sent today by Microsoft representatives from the Visual FoxPro team. From various aspects of marketing to demos of Web services in Visual FoxPro and a first shot at Toledo, attendees were extremly satisified by a well presented keynote by Ken Levy, Randy Brown and Calvin Hsia.
VFP 7 marketing
Ken started the keynote with several points in regards the marketing of Visual FoxPro. One of them was the mention about the Universal Thread already running on Visual FoxPro 7. When he asked by a show a hand to know how many attendees have already installed version 7 in their development environment, we got an impressive count. Ken stated that we could even consider the new marketing approach to be a Visual FoxPro feature. <s>
Among several announcements, he mentioned the Visual FoxPro 7 German and Spanish versions will be relesead soon. He also showed us that Visual FoxPro is clearly visible on the Microsoft Shop site at shop.microsoft.com. Visual FoxPro 7 is appearing on top of that page.
He talked about the White papers on Microsoft Visual FoxPro site. He invited us to request what kind of White papers we would like to see. Those can be found at msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro. We could improve Visual FoxPro visibility by submitting our own case studies. Don't hesitate to submit them to the Microsoft Visual FoxPro team. -
One interesting option would be the release of a Visual FoxPro 7 quick tour from their site which will allow users to download and run the Visual FoxPro 7 quick tour locally.
Ken also mentioned his interest of increasing the interaction of the Visual FoxPro team at conferences as well as for local user group meetings to offer specific presentations about the product.
On external sources, an increase of visibility is expected on XML and SQL Server magazines as well as the MSDN mailing list. Visual FoxPro is the full product to be shipped with full support on Web services. See Erik Moore's article on the current MSDN issue for some cool stuff on COM, XML and Web services in Visual FoxPro at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/10/VFP7/VFP7.asp. The article is titled "Visual FoxPro 7.0: Program Your Data with Powerful New COM, XML, and Web Services Support".
Review of some new items in Visual FoxPro 7
Ken reviewed some new items in Visual FoxPro. Those included the IntelliSense extensibility, the additional power in the DBC such as security and logging, the event binding interoperatibility, the COM Server enhancements, the remote access for OLE DB Provider, the XML and Web services data integration and the SOAP Toolkit 2.0 and InstallShield.
Among those new features, Ken demonstrated a Web service to allow tracking of shipped items by Fedex. Basically, once the Web service is registered, you only have to add it in your code and the Web service setup will be done automatically in your code. The demo was using Visual FoxPro to track a specific shipped item. We obtained a query from the Fedex server which returned that the item was in fact received in San Diego. I has the occaswion to try this Web service myself a few days ago and the integration was quite simple. It took about 30 seconds to put it in a PRG and run it.
More new features in Visual FoxPro 7
Randy Brown showed us some more new features in Visual FoxPro 7.
- new events for mouse in/mouse out which allows to take action when moving the mouse over objects
- grid now supports additional features such as header wrapping and row highlighting
- database event security (in the demo, by the use of a Web service, he retrieved a remote key to decrypt a field)
- document view window to quickly navigate between various components such as methods
- sample of using a Web service to extract a value from another server/PC for a specific report field
- demonstrated the use of the Object Browser to get the object component details such as properties and methods for registered COM services
- use of Smart Tags to increase productivity
Calvin Hsia give us a first impression of Toledo.
- Tooltip wrapping
- Highighting of the current record backcolor of a grid by the use of one line property setup
- Switching of tab locations of pageframes
- Modify structure ability to set collate setup on specific fields
- Collate clause support in the index command
- Ability to take advantage of Windows XP settings such as selecting a Windows theme
- Modify structure support Auto increment setup on a field
- Auto sizing of grid fields
User Group leaders meeting
A special user group leaders meeting is scheduled Thuesday 22h30. This will allow interaction with Microsoft and user group leaders to get the most out of the marketing of user group activities. The Universal Thread will also be present in regards to its recent release about the User Group Meeting Tracker. The User Group Meeting Tracker is located at http://www.universalthread.com/UserGroupMeetingTracker. We already had a meeting this morning with someone involved in the promotion of user group activities and a lot of good enhancements are expected. We'll talk about those at the meeting and see how we can help in that direction.
FoxCentral.net
The announcement of FoxCentral.net has been released. This Visual FoxPro community portal has been designed and built by Rick Strahl, from West-Wind, and will be used to broastcast Visual FoxPro news items across the community. This will be demoed tonight. The Universal Thread will be present to talk a little bit about its interaction and how it is presently being used.
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Bonus Session
by Michel Fournier
FoxCentral.net has been demonstrated during the Advisor DevCon 2001 Bonus session on monday night. DevCon attendees were able to get a preview of this new Visual FoxPro community portal for the release of Visual FoxPro news. Ken Levy, Rick Strahl and Michel Fournier talked about its features and its implementation.
FoxCentral.net overview
FoxCentral.net has been designed and hosted at Rick Strahl's West-Wind Web site. Rick has delivered a rich set of classes which allows us the ability to use it either as a client or as a provider. This new Visual FoxPro news portal allows full flexibility on the client side which allows customization in any way we need. Various implementations can be designed to fit our own requirements. The main goal of FoxCentral is the ability to query the Visual FoxPro news from the community which are being submitted by several providers. As FoxCentral server is built under a Web service, this means that we can use it either from a Web page, a Visual FoxPro application or in any other implementation we wish.
Several providers are already defined in FoxCentral. West-Wind, Microsoft and the Universal Thread have been the first providers to actually work with it. The Universal Thread is making use of FoxCentral since the last four days. Basically, once we approve a Visual FoxPro news, it is also submitted to FoxCentral by the use of a Web service which is then available to the community with a FoxCentral client.
Ken Levy has talked about all of its possibilities. Basically, it's whatever we want to do with it. Ken has demoed a little application he built just before the session in order to show some capabilities of a FoxCentral client. As you can see, the implementation of a FoxCentral client can be done pretty fast. Basically, in a meeting before the session, I had the occasion to see Rick demoed a use of FoxCentral in less than five minutes. The declaration of a Web service simplifies the development process. Once that is done, it's only a question of calling a method and working locally with the data.
From the server side
Rick then explained us what the server and client code looks like. He talked about some methods we could use to query the Visual FoxPro news from FoxCentral as a client as well as some methods which are useful from the provider's side.
He showed us the integration of some client components for FoxCentral he did in his West-Wind Messages Reader which allows the reader to obtain a list of news from FoxCentral based on some criterias such as selecting the provider and the date. He showed us the FoxCentral Web site news page which is also making use of FoxCentral data. The FoxCentral data is located at http://www.foxcentral.net.
From the provider side
Michel Fournier talked a little bit about the integration of FoxCentral components from a provider's perspective. As he explained, in some scenarios, such as the Universal Thread, the data entry of such news is already done by the application itself and the ability to submit those news to FoxCentral is done by a batch mode operation. So, this requires a few ajustments in the code in order to achieve that.
Basically, it is done in two steps. The first steps requires some code which will maintain a relationship table from the Universal Thread news which will then be taken in charge by the batch mode application. We will maintain that table whenever we add, update or remove a news on the Universal Thread. So, as we want to isolate the business logic in one single table, the need to have a FoxCentral news table on the Universal Thread was necessary. This also opens the door for upcoming options such as the storage of relationship records for other types of content such as Articles and User Group meetings. Once that table is updated, the batch mode application can then scan it and submit pending news.
This is where the second steps kicks in. The batch mode application runs every 60 seconds. Among other tasks being executed at specific intervals, one of them is now the ability to submit news to FoxCentral. The application will scan all records which have not been submitted. If it is being submitted ok, a submitted field in the table will be updated to represent the status of the transaction. We can then benefit of an administration option to monitor this table to see if those items have been submitted with success.
When Michel did the demo, he started to show the main page of the Universal Thread. We see what were the current news items. He also showed us the FoxCentral page on Rick's site to show the current status over there as well. Then, he went into the Administration mode of the Universal Thread and approved two news. We then go into the monitoring option to see that two news have been added but they were waiting to be processed. Then, a few seconds after, we see that the monitoring option was showing a success on those two transactions. We then viewed the Universal Thread main page and the FoxCentral Web site to see that those news were in fact well submitted.
Michel also confirmed that the ability of the Universal Thread to establish some Web services for that type of operations is planned. In addition to allow a FoxCentral client the ability to query some news from the Universal Thread, users will also be able to query other types of content as mentioned in the previous paragraphs.
Ken concluded the demo with some final notes on FoxCentral and the possibilities that are offered to us.
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62 Rue Doucet, Petit-Rocher, New Brunswick, E8J 1L3
Telephone: 1-506-783-9007 Email: mfournier@levelextreme.com
