Creating Visual FoxPro Applications with Visual FoxExpress

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Summary: Become a Better Visual FoxExpress Programmer
Review: I found Bob and Dan's book an extremly valuable asset in developing business applications. Not only does the Book teach you the fundmentals and help the beginner it is also a great tool for advanced users as well. You will find your self refering to it time and time again.

The Book does a great job covering such topics as Security and lookups. It covers all the facets of creating an application using Visual FoxPro and Visual Foxexpress. Plus you get an electronic version and source code.

If you are a VFE developer you can not do with out this book!

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Summary: Indispensable tool for using Visual FoxExpress
Review: I have been a dBase/FoxPro programmer for 13 years and have used FoxExpress/Visual FoxExpress (VFE) for about 5 years. It has always been a large learning curve for me with VFE but worth it in the end because of the superiority of the product. I read this book cover to cover in a week. After doing so, I had not only an understanding of the "guts" of VFE but of nTier development in general. But beware, the book is so compelling, that I had to go and re-do large amounts of code that I had already written. I highly recommend VFE as a framework and this book as its necessary companion.

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Summary: A must have for the Visual FoxExpress developer
Review: I have read this book twice and will probably read it again. Everytime I read it I gain a little more insight into this great foundation and n-tier development. I especially like the explanation of the step-through logic in Chapter 10 and the explanation of each method in the various objects.

I think that if you buy Visual FoxExpress and buy this book, you will reduce your learning curve by several months.

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Summary: Must have for all VFP developers!!!
Review: If you are a database professional programmer or student, this book is an absolute necessity. It will clearly provide a road map for developing really powerful complete applications with a minimum of time and effort. The book demonstrates the basics, provides alternatives for exploration and will continue to be a required reference. The complete text is available for on screen searching and guidance. The included tutorial with source code shows exactly what to do and why. MS VFP is the best front end database. VFE (Visual Fox Express - F1 Technologies) is the best RAD framework (and visual classes). This book is the key to sucessful use of these tools.

Paul Kaminsky, Pres. Pro Systems Consultants

Rating:
Summary: A "Must Have"
Review: This book is a "must have" reference for all Visual Foxpro programmers who use Visual FoxExpress. The information in this book will save many hours of development time. I highly recommend it.

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Summary: Extremely helpful and very readable!
Review: This book is a crucial part of my reference library. Although Visual FoxExpress comes with good documentation and a sample application, it lacks the step by step walkthrough with explanations on the thoughts behind the concepts. This book fills in the blanks very nicely and helps the reader to gain a better understanding of not just the "how" but also the "why". The authors do not hesitate to inject their own observances and opinions about working this powerful framework. This makes it an interesting read as well as a good reference.

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Summary: Clearly a "Must Have"
Review: This book is clearly a "must have" for anyone developing with VFE. Despite spending a fair amount of time on the VFE Tech Support Conference, attending 2 VFE DevCons, etc., I have found this book to be invaluable. In particular, I like the narratives on the Instantiation of the Application object and Form, along with the discussion of various key properties and methods of the major classes. To the extent that one spends time actually studying these narratives, properties, and methods in conjunction with stepping thru the code, I feel this will reap rewards in the form of better productivity and higher quality applications. For those who aspire to get some depth of understanding of this framework, this book is for you.

Rating:
Summary: Clearly a "Must Have"
Review: This book is clearly a "must have" for anyone developing with VFE. Despite spending a fair amount of time on the VFE Tech Support Conference, attending 2 VFE DevCons, etc., I have found this book to be invaluable. In particular, I like the narratives on the Instantiation of the Application object and Form, along with the discussion of various key properties and methods of the major classes. To the extent that one spends time actually studying these narratives, properties, and methods in conjunction with stepping thru the code, I feel this will reap rewards in the form of better productivity and higher quality applications. For those who aspire to get some depth of understanding of this framework, this book is for you.

Rating:
Summary: A "Must Have"
Review: This book is great for both new users of the VFE framework and experienced users alike. Not only does it provide step-by-step guidelines for building your apps with the VFE framework, but it also contains numerous tips and tricks for experienced developers. A required reference for all VFP/VFE developers!

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Summary: Creating Visual Foxpro Applications with Visual FoxExpress
Review: Visual FoxExpress is an object-oriented n-tier Framework for developing applications with Visual Foxpro. If you decide to use it for developing applications, you will face a steep learning curve as with any such product. The documentation is generally not geared to the newcomer.

Bob Archer and Dan Jurden have provided a great service to the programming community by supplying documentation that will bring you to a fast and fairly deep understanding of Visual FoxExpress (VFE). Even experienced users may pick up some new ideas.

The first chapters of the book form an outline of the major features of the framework. These are integrated with a tutorial that is included with the book. Features are discussed in text and demonstrated in the tutorial. Useful custom code snippets are presented which I find myself going back to when I add my own customization to the framework. Techniques are outlined which maintain the object oriented and n-tier nature of the product. The techniques presented are designed to scale well to client/server applications.

Chapters 4 thru 8, correspond basically to the tiers of the framework; data structures, metadata, business objects, presentation objects and forms. Chapter 9 ties these together into a entire application. Chapter 10, my favorite, is called 'How It Works.' This chapter really takes you through the processes used by the Framework. The understanding gained here is essential when you want to provide your own customizations.

Chapter 11 details the working of the interface controls. After some highlights of common elements of all data edit controls, the framework's quickfill textbox control, the date time features of the textbox control and toolbars are covered. Unfortunately, the authors chose not to go into any detail about menus in the final section. The menus are pretty automatic in VFE and if something had to be skipped, this was a good choice.

Chapter 12 is Data Validation. It deals largely with lookups. Besides outlining how lookups work, the authors outline some techniques to overcome some shortcomings in the scalability of the standard VFE lookup methods.

Chapter 13 is Working with Views. Again the authors provide techniques designed to scale well as the size of the data sources grow. They also cover methods for relating view that are conducive to code reuse and maintainibility. The limitations of the view designer are discussed and alternatives illustrated.

Chapter 14, Related Data and Forms, will be very valuable to you as you try to design your user interfaces. Presenting your users with an organized, intuitive interface to maintaining records, child records, grandchild records, ... is challenging. This chapter illustrates some of the common methods you may find useful.

Chapters 15 thru 20 cover more Framework topics including Security features and reporting. The authors devote chapters to extending the Framework and client/server applications.

Pay attention to the tips and warnings through out the book. They WILL save you many hours of grief.

This book is not the final word on VFE. I am on my third reading of this book and still learning from it. Not all the answers to my questions are here, but without it, I might not even know the questions.

Many thanks to the authors for providing this roadmap to VFE.