Pixie

I came across a cool little free utility today: Pixie. It does only one very simple thing: it shows the color of the pixel under the mouse in various measurement systems: HTML, RGB, hex, CYMK, and HSV. This is really useful if you're designing a Web site or an image and want to use the same color as an existing image. In the image below, the mouse pointer isn't shown, but it's over the orange part of the Blogger icon in the "Weblog" box at the right.

FoxRockx Subscriptions Now Available

The FoxRockx Web site is now open for business. You can check out the contents of the first issue and subscribe. In addition to the magazine, subscribers get full online access to past issues of FoxTalk, including source code, back to 1996.

Another Sedna Installer Issue

Craig Boyd blogged about the Sedna installer not handling the VFP DDEX provider properly. This weekend, Rick Schummer found an issue while testing my chapter for our upcoming Sedna and VFP 9 SP2 book: he got a “Type Library VISTADIALOGS4COM.TASKDIALOG not found” error when running some code using Vista dialog event handlers that come with Sedna. Interestingly, it worked on my laptop but gave the same error running on my home desktop system.

Digging into this, I found that I had an earlier Sedna CTP on my laptop and the release version on my desktop. My laptop had a type library for the Vista dialogs, VistaDialogs4COM.tlb but my desktop didn't. I figured it was a registration issue, so I ran RegAsm (the .NET utility that registers a .NET DLL as a COM object) with /TLB as a parameter so it would generate a type library. That didn't work, so I ran RegAsm with /U to unregister and then RegAsm with /CodeBase and /TLB, and that worked. So, obviously the Sedna installer is missing /TLB from the RegAsm command line call.

In case anyone else wants to take care of this, here's the contents of a BAT file you can use. Change the paths as necessary and use Run as Administrator.

rem First unregister
  
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\regasm.exe "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9\Sedna\VistaDialogs4COM\VistaDialogs4COM.dll" /u

rem Now re-register to generate TLB
  
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\regasm.exe "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9\Sedna\VistaDialogs4COM\VistaDialogs4COM.dll" /codebase /tlb

pause

Southwest Fox 2008: Call for Speakers

The premier VFP conference in North America, Southwest Fox, will take place October 16-19 in Mesa, Arizona. We're now looking for speakers. If you're interested, please check out the Call for Speakers link at http://www.swfox.net/callforspeakers.aspx. Proposals are due by March 17.

FoxRockx

The first issue of FoxRockx, a new bimonthly magazine published by MVP Rainer Becker, is almost ready for release. The first issue has an introduction to VFPX by Rick Schummer, a Kitbox article from Andy Kramek and Marcia Akins, a how to-article from Tamar Granor, and part one of a two-part article presenting generic import classes by me.

If you're a current FoxTalk subscriber, the remainder of your subscription will automatically be honored as a FoxRockx subscription, as Rainer has taken over FoxTalk from Eli Journals. Something is also being done for Advisor Guide to Visual FoxPro subscribers, although I don't have details. For everyone else, subscriptions are inexpensive: $99 US/99 euros for online-only or $138 US/128 euros for online and printed copy. Subscriptions in North America will be available from Hentzenwerke Publishing.

The Web site isn't quite ready yet but they're working on it.

In addition to the magazine, another benefit is online access to past issues, including source code, of FoxTalk. As far as I'm concerned, that's worth the subscription price alone!

Please support this new magazine by subscribing as soon as subscriptions are available. This is the only magazine devoted exclusively to VFP, and like VFP conferences, this falls into a "use or lose it" category.

Another Update for My Namespace

While working on a chapter on the My namespace for an upcoming book on VFP 9 Service Pack 2 and Sedna (more details in a future post), I came across and fixed a couple of bugs:

• The My Registration Editor form had a typo in the tooltip for one of the edit boxes and the wrong tooltip for another. Also, it didn't find an existing record in the My table for a non-My class, so it acted like the class was being registered for the first time.
• The MyFoxCode class, the main IntelliSense class for My, would locate and use deleted records in the My table rather than the current ones.

I've posted an updated version on the Technical Papers page of one of my Web sites, www.stonefield.com.

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.