What's new in the Visual FoxPro Community

The meeting on Tuesday 9 Feb 2010 has been cancelled in view of the approaching winter storm. Our next meeting is scheduled for 9 March 2010 - save the date!

Tom Corrigan will give an overview of Amazon Cloud computing to lead off the night. There will be time for anyone else to show what you are working on. We have always had very interesting presentations due to this policy of encouraging member initiative. Here is the RSVP link for the February meeting http://j.mp/aQnmD8 The time and place are the same as always: 5:30 Tuesday Feb 9th at 200 S. Wacker Drive, Suite 1500 -- Tech Nexus. See you there?!

The January 16, 2010 release of the VMP framework has been posted, containing various bug fixes as well as some enhancements including an enhancement to X8ShellExecute and full support for the LABEL command WINDOW clauase in VFP 9.

West Wind Technologies has released version 5.51 of its Web Development framework for Visual FoxPro. Web Connecton makes it easy to build Web and distributed applications with Visual FoxPro using pure Foxo code within the Visual FoxPro IDE while optionally supporting design time integration with Visual Studio. Version 5.51 is a maintenance release that adds a handful of new features and improvements and fixes several small issues. Web Connection is distributed as shareware so you can try it for free.

The next meeting of the Philadelphia VFP User Group will take place Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 7:00 PM. Tamar E. Granor will present "Getting Your Head Around Business Objects," previously seen at Southwest Fox 2009. For many years, we've heard that business objects are important, but most of the examples are tied too tightly to the user interface to really make the point. In this session, we use a highly graphical example to show how business objects can really improve your applications. We see how a well-designed set of business objects makes changing an application's behavior easier and keeps your application's functionality separate from its user interface.

We will have a GeneXus rep in to do a live demo of their IDE & development platform for VFP, as well as many other languages like Java & .Net. They recently released their 11th version. Local customers will also talk about their use of GeneXus. Les Pinter who many in the VFP community know, is a big proponent of GeneXus: ?The degree of intelligence in the GeneXus IDE is really amazing. It is an eye-opener.? Les Pinter VFP MVP 2002-2005 Check it out-- http://www.genexus.com/portal/hgxpp001.aspx?2 12 Jan 2010, 5:30 pm at the usual location: Tech Nexus, 200 S. Wacker Drive 15th floor. That's across the street from the Willis/Sears Tower. Check our web site for the RSVP link.

West Wind Technologies has released Version 1.12 of the West Wind Web Toolkit for ASP.NET. This toolkit provides a host of controls, components and important re-usable utilities for every day ASP.NET and .NET development as well as a light weight LINQ based business framework for easy CRUD data access. This update is a maintenance release that provides a host of improvments: There's a new self-contained Pager control, a new ResponseFilter class for capturing and filtering Response output, several jQuery ASP.NET interaction functions in the client libraries and a host of new features for the localization provider and Resource administration application. The toolkit is free for personal and non-commercial use and generously licensed for commercial or organizational use.

West Wind Technologies has released a maintenance updated of West Wind Client Tools. The Client Tools provide a host of Internet functionality to client desktop applications including support for sending and retrieving email, rich HTTP access, FTP up and downloads as well as high level data services that allow for remote data and RPC calls over HTTP. The toolkit also contains utility classes including a simple business object layer, SQL Server access wrapper, SOAP and XML class, PDF rendering and more. This update is primarily a maintenance release but also adds a few new features. A new wwSMTP class enhances existing SMTP support with SSL/TLS secure communications as well as many wwDotNetBridge enhancements for simplifying VFP .NET Interop. Client Tools is available as shareware and updates are free to registered users.