ReportListener Article Available

I wrote a two-part series of articles in FoxTalk in April and May 2005 that discussed a ReportListener which stores the position each object was rendered at in a cursor. That ReportListener collaborates with a custom preview window to provide a "live" preview surface. This gives cool abilities to the preview window, including hyperlinking and support for finding and highlighting text.

The first article was republished on MSDN (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms947692.aspx) but the second wasn't (or is now missing). So, I've posted both articles and the source code at http://www.stonefield.com/techpap.html.

Second Vista Article Online

I completely forgot to mention this earlier: part 2 of my Advisor series on VFP and Vista is available online at http://my.advisor.com/doc/19195. In this article, I go over opportunities to take advantage of new Vista features, including user interface improvements, Windows Desktop Search, RSS feeds, and XML Paper Specification.

Update: Since Advisor is closing online access to their articles, I have put a copy of my “Developing VFP Applications for Windows Vista” white paper, the source material for this article, on the Technical Papers page of Stonefield’s web site.

Vista SP1 Fixes a Problem

A weird issue cropped up on my system a couple of weeks ago. Because of when it occurred, I'm pretty sure it was caused by a patch installed by Windows Update. The problem: opening Windows Explorer or an Open File dialog took about 30 seconds. The problem was worse when I was connected to our LAN and a little better when undocked. It didn't matter whether it was for a local drive or network drive; it still took an annoying amount of time to see the window or dialog.

I did some research on this and tried turning off the sharing violation notification delay as noted at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/889588. Even more weird, that fixed the problem for a couple of hours, but then it went back to the horrible delay.

Finally, I decided to install Vista SP1 (available next month via Windows Update but available now for MSDN subscribers) and see if that helped. Installation was easy: create a system restore point just in case, start the process, go for lunch, done when I got back. And I'm happy to report that the problem has gone away: Windows Explorer comes up very quickly for both local and network drives now.

DevCon RIP?

As I suspected when there were only 35 attendees at last year's conference, it looks there won't be a VFP DevCon this year. The Advisor Summit in April features .Net, Visual Studio, ASP.Net, SQL Server, and Access, but no VFP.

DevCon has been irrelevant for several years, as other conferences (including Southwest Fox) long ago surpassed it for quality and cost. So its loss, while slightly lamented strictly from a historical point-of-view, will hardly be noticed.