Asiana Flight 214 Reconstruction

CGI recreation of how Asiana Flight 214 descended for landing, compared to how it SHOULD have descended for landing. (posted by John Suchocki)

Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR) - Proud Mary

The first cellphone interruption of a musical performance?

 

The first episode of Get Smart. Mel Brooks and Buck Henry were visionaries.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Visual FoxPro 9 SP2 Hotfix Released

Great news! (about time!)

Post by Rick Schummer [MVP]:

Microsoft has released a hotfix to the most serious Report Designer bug in VFP 9 SP2. You can read about the fix in the Microsoft KnowledgeBase article #968409, titled "FIX: The group header of a data grouping is not printed at the top of each page as expected after you install Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0 Service Pack 2". You can read about all the details on Cathy Pountney's and Rick Schummer's blog post on the topic.

Glad to hear it. Thanks Rick for the great news!

ISEXP : error -6264: A record in the Property table is using string ID 'ID_STRING1' for column 'Value' but this string is blank...

I have not used InstallShield Express in a long while. I was asked to prepare a utility at work to send to one of our clients. This was done in VFP (just one stand-alone screen with a few procedures).

I fired-up IS-Express, which I had not used in over a year as I've been doing mostly ASP.NET work, and the Build process came up with this error.

I filled all the empty lines I could find but could not find STRING1.

A Google search for the error pointed to a blog entry by Juan Calcagno, a fellow VFP developer. I did the Export to TXT function as he explained and followed the first commentator's post.

Then got another error:
"Internal Error 2855, SetupType, RadioGroup"

This one I solved from another google search to the InstallSite Forum.

Problem solved.

Sad news

I just learned from Andy Kramek that Ceil Silver lost her fight with cancer and passed away day before yesterday.

Ceil was a gifted developer, writer and magazine editor. She will be missed by the FoxPro community and by all that knew her.

No MVP award this year for me

I did not make the cut for this year's MVP Award. I have been awarded as an MVP for Visual FoxPro, one of Microsoft's finest pieces of software, every year from 2001 to 2008.

It has been a good run. I think I did my best for the community. although this year I did have less time to contribute online.

I have made many friends, in person and online in this wonderful community. I will not go away. If I can help anybody please just give me a ring or ask me online. Cheers!

Ken Levy joins EPS-Software!

I received the news that Ken Levy joined EPS (read Press Release) to evangelize their line of brands and products. I was late to the news (work has a habit of interfering sometimes) as I see Craig and Andy have already covered it. Good move for the folks at EPS.

Full Justified texts in reports with GdiPlusX

Cesar has a great post with examples, code and screenshots, of how to do reporting in VFPwith text justification using GdiPlusX. Well done!

(Via Foxite)

Ken Murphy's Memorial Page

Eric Den Doop [VFP MVP] has created a beautiful memorial for Ken Murphy who passed away this week.

You can find Ken’s memorial page here:
http://www.foxite.com/memorial/kenmurphy.aspx

Shocked by the news to the VFP community

I am shocked and saddened to learn from Doug that Ken Murphy [VFP MVP] passed away from a heart attack. I met Ken last week at the MVP Summit. An affable guy and very knowledgeable. A sad day for the community.

Craig Bailey shot this picture of Ken and Schnubbs at the 2008 MVP Summit last week.

The Fox Team delivers! VFP SP2 Help file fix is out!

As noted by Rick Schummer, the VFP9 SP2 help file fix is available. It was promised by YAG at the MVP Summit in Redmond last week. Thanks guys!

Back from the MVP Summit

Just came back from Seattle and Redmond where I attended the Microsoft 2008 MVP Summit, and event by invitation where MVPs get together and get to talk to the development teams and Microsoft management.

I had a great time and had the pleasure to meet some old friends and colleagues. One thing I wanted to talk about is how, even though the Fox Team is not there anymore, as their members have moved on to other projects within the company, they still are the Fox Team and came to talk to us and discuss the issues with the Fox. I wanted to write about this but Rick Schummer did an excellent job and put it better that I could.

FoxPro videos on YouTube!

Andrew McNeil found this 1990 promotional video from Fox Software. I had never seen this one before. It surely brings back memories and old faces. Nicely done Andy!

While looking at the offerings in YouTube I also found this short one from our Fox MVP meeting intro in 2007, by Craig Bailey. It turns out I'm in YouTube now! Thanks Craig!

FoxTalk is dead. FoxRockX is alive!

Maybe a little late to the info but important nonetheless. The German Foxpro Group (DFPUG), a dedicated group of FoxPro professionals, including several VFP conference speakers and MVPs, have started a new magazine, taking over from FoxTalk and FoxPro Advisor. They offer a bimonthly edition online for subscribers, (with optional print subscription also available). All subscribers get access to FoxTalk's archives too.

This is great news for FoxPro developers world-wide. FoxPro is still a vibrant and powerful programming language, with new additions like Microsoft's SEDNA project and the comunnity-developed additions of VFPx.

Well done, and congratulations to Rainer Becker and his dedicated team.

Sedna released!

Microsoft has released the Sedna components for Visual FoxPro. Sedna is a collection of libraries, samples and add-ons to Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP2.

More details in the postings from Craig and Rick.

You can download the add-on components directly from Microsoft.

VFP Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Tamar Granor

I just heard that Tamar Granor was awarded the VFP Lifetime Achievement Award at the Southwest Fox 2007 Conference this past week.

I am very pleased about this, and want to congratulate her as I cannot think of anyone more deserving. Tamar has been a constant advocate for Visual FoxPro, helping users for a very long time. She has been editor of FoxPro Advisor Magazine for years, a conference speaker countless times, and one of the very few continuous Microsoft MVPs receiving the award every year since the program's inception in 1993.

My only regret is that I could not make it to the conference this time to give her congrats in person. Way to go Tamar!

Todd on VFP and SQL Server scripts

Todd McKenna has a good blog post titled Use .sql Files with SQLEXEC for Better Script Management showing how to decouple your middleware code from your database in your data access layer. Namely he shows an example on going from this:

SQLEXEC(lnConnHand,'SELECT * FROM Customer')

to this:

SQLEXEC(lnConnHand,FILETOSTR("c:\sqlserver2005\script1.sql"))

This is a very good idea, similar to using the ExecScript() function in VFP but applying it to SQL Server and getting the queries from script files. Of course, you could use Stored Procedures which are precompiled and optimized in SQL Server but Todd's idea makes for simple decoupling and portability. What you have to watch for (as is also with ExecScript) is security. If you read script files from disk, anybody could change them and supply malicious scripts. One possible answer is to read them from Memo fields instead, where you have a little more security control (but not much unless you encrypt them). In short, they do not replace Stored Procedures for security and speed, but they are very flexible and very handy.

Visual FoxPro SP2 released!

Microsoft released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Visual FoxPro 9.0 yesterday night and it is now available for download!

Milind Lele, Program Manager wrote a short note on the Visual FoxPro page. Thanks Milind for your team's hard work!

Here's a list of fixed bugs. XSOURCE for this release will be coming out soon.

I'm an MVP again!

Microsoft awarded me with the MVP award for the 8th consecutive year. This is an honor and an incentive to try to help the community even harder. The award is given for helping with Visual FoxPro issues, in my case in Forums in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Let me also congratulate the other MVPs that have received the award for this 2007-2008 cycle.