Matt Slay was a great contributor to the Fox community and a great guy. Sadly, he passed away in October 2021. He is sorely missed.
However, his legacy lives on: the VFPX administrators have forked his projects and changed the project list links to the new repositories so community members can continue Matt's work.
Our one-day Virtual Fox Fest 2022 (May) will be Thursday, May 5, 2022. It still has the same great features everyone loves about VFF: great speakers delivering great sessions, live chatting during presentations, and getting to hang out virtually with new and old friends. This event will feature classic sessions from previous conferences, updated for 2022.
We’re still discussing whether to hold Southwest Fox in Arizona this fall. We hope to announce our plans for a fall conference before our May event.
SQL Server Management Studio typically takes a minute or so to start on my machine. I just figured it was a slow app, but then I saw it load much faster on another machine. Searching for a solution led me to Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio is too Slow (archive.org), which nicely solved the problem. Now it starts up in five seconds.
(As an aside, I use a hosts file from Steven Black's https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts to help block malware and adware.)
You may be aware that Thor can survive a CLEAR ALL. (If you aren’t familiar with Thor, you really should be: https://github.com/VFPX/Thor.) While that seems impossible, it’s actually pretty simple but does require that Thor be designed in a certain way.
As you know, CLEAR ALL nukes all objects (among other things; see the VFP help for a complete list of what it affects). And yet, after executing CLEAR ALL, if you choose any of the functions in the Thor menus or use one of the hot keys you’ve assigned in Thor, it works. How is that possible?
The secret is that _SCREEN and _VFP are the only objects that survive CLEAR ALL. Object members of those objects don’t survive but non-object members retain their values. When Thor starts up, it creates a new property of _SCREEN called cThorDispatcher and puts some code into that property. Near the start of that code is the following:
If PemStatus(_Screen, 'oThor', 5) = .F. or Vartype(_Screen.oThor) # 'O'
_Screen.AddProperty('oThor', Newobject ('oThor', 'Thor.vcx', lcThorApp, lcThorFolder))
EndIf
So, if there’s no oThor member of _SCREEN or it doesn’t contain an object, that property is created and the main Thor class is instantiated into it.
How does that help? It turns out that most places that call Thor functionality don’t execute code like _SCREEN.oThor.SomeMethod(). Instead, they use code like this:
loThor = execscript(_screen.cThorDispatcher, 'Thor Engine=')
loThor.SomeMethod()
Of course, Thor had to be designed to support that: every place that calls Thor methods has to go through the Thor dispatcher rather than calling them directly.
Ingenious!
Here are some follow-up notes about Virtual Fox Fest 2021 (October):
Last call! (we want to make sure we have your attention)
The Early Bird discount ends midnight (North American Eastern time) on Thursday, which is tomorrow night. Here is the direct link to get registered!
Virtual Fox Fest is October 14, 20, and 26, 2021!
Thanks to all who have already registered for Virtual Fox Fest; we appreciate your support and our speakers are excited to share all their sessions with you all soon. There is less than a month until the first day of the conference!
That said, we know there are procrastinators who have not registered and have good intentions to do so before the conference starts. Please, please, please do so sooner than later. Our hard working registration staff of one is also a presenter who is practicing and refining his session, and has more than a full-time job working on customer projects.
In case you are procrastinating, please register for Virtual Fox Fest before October 1st. Three good reasons:
It literally takes just a few minutes to register. We'd hate to see you miss the opportunity to get a head start on all the goodies. Go get registered! Now, really, don't waste another minute. Here is the link: register me now
Virtual Fox Fest is October 14, 20, and 26, 2021!
Speakers and Sessions for Virtual Fox Fest 2021 (October) have been announced, and registration is open!
While I’m of course interested in all the sessions, the two that interest me the most are John Ryan’s VFP C++ Compiler: Towards Another Decade of Secure, Extensible, Portable VFP Apps and Christof Wollenhaupt’s WPF: Modern UIs in VFP Applications. I started using Visual FoxPro Advanced (VFPA) after Dr. Ryan’s session on it at Virtual Fox Fest 2020 so this session should take things to the next level. And Christof is a speaker’s speaker: the one session all speakers always attend because of Christof’s knowledge and humor.
I released a new project to VFPX today called ErrorHandler. It’s a highly configurable and customizable error handler for any VFP application. Implementing ErrorHandler is as simple as adding a few files to your project, adding one line of code to your application startup, and deploying a few files with your application (some of which, such as wwDotNetBridge, you may already be deploying).
ErrorHandler supports logging error information to a table, displaying an easy-to-understand dialog to the user (see image below, although you can replace that dialog with one of your choosing), notifying support staff about the error via email or support ticket, and recovering from the error (either continuing in the application but not returning to the method that caused the error or terminating the application).
See the documentation included with the project for complete details on how to implement and customize ErrorHandler in your applications.
Just a reminder that the deadline to submit session proposals for Virtual Fox Fest is next Monday, June 7th. You'll find details on our Call for Speakers page. We look forward to your ideas and session proposals.
Virtual Fox Fest is October 14, 20, and 26, 2021.
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