Posts related to: FoxPro
Web Connection 8.5 Release Post
It's been a bit since the last Web Connection release, and this update while a maintenance release, has quite a few updates and small enhancements. There are update to the CORS template, Error Handling on the server, a number of HTTP and FTP fixes and tweaks in the client framework and we've significantly updated the Docs and Blog sites.
Creating and Debugging .NET Assemblies for wwDotnetBridge and Visual FoxPro
wwDotnetBridge lets you interface with .NET code directly, but if need to access more than a handful of lines of .NET code from FoxPro, it's a good idea to create a separate dedicated .NET component and call that instead. There are many benefits to easier and more discoverable access to functionality, better performance and support for a few features that don't work well through wwDotnetBridge. In this post I show how to create a .NET component, build and run it, and how debug it as well.
FoxPro Running on a Windows ARM Device
I recently picked up a Windows ARM 'Co-Pilot' capable laptop and took it for a spin running my typical spread of Windows applications and tools. I also checked out how well it works with FoxPro - here's what I found.
Web Connection 8.1 Release Post
Web Connection 8.1 is out. This is a small maintenance release, but it does include a few significant updates.
Making Web Connection Work with Response Output Greater than 16mb
Web Connection in the past has not supported > 16mb direct output via plain string based output, due to FoxPro's 16mb string limit. 16mb is a lot of text and while I generally don't recommend returning that much data as part of non-file request (which does support larger files) it's a feature request that comes up from time to time as people overrun the limit. During last weekend's SW Fox conference I heard about this issue again in a session and decided to address it once and for all and this posts describes the change and how it's implemented.
wwDotnetBridge Revisited: An updated look at FoxPro .NET Interop
In this very long white paper for the Southwest Fox conference, I discuss the basics of wwDotnetBridge and then demonstrate a variety of functionality with 10 examples. We'll see basic usage, how to wrap classes in FoxPro and .NET, how to use a variety of .NET 3rd party libraries, how to handle .NET events and how to make Task based async calls.
West Wind Client Tools 8.0 Release Notes
West Wind Client Tools 8.0 has released as a major version rollup release. Here's all that's new and fixed.
wwDotnetBridge and Loading Native Dependencies for .NET Assemblies
If you're using a .NET component with wwDotnetBridge or plain COM Interop that has a native dependency on non-.NET DLLs, you need to be careful to ensure that the native libraries can be found. In this post I describe how .NET assembly loading works and how external native dependencies are resolved in .NET and subsequently how you have to deal with them in your FoxPro applications.
Launching FoxPro in a Project Folder
I work with a lot of different customers that use FoxPro to build applications, and it always amazes me when I see developers launching into their application by starting FoxPro and then explicitly navigating - via `CD` commands or even interactively - to the actual project folder for about a minute. In this post I describe why it's a good idea to build a consistent startup environment for your development setup and some of the ways you can accomplish that task.
Web Connection 7.32 released
Web Connection 7.32 is out and it's a small maintenence update. In this post I go over some of the small feature updates and fixes and describe them in more detail.
Watch out for 64 bit Incompatibility using the Visual FoxPro OleDb Provider
If you need to access FoxPro data from other application via the VFP OleDb driver, watch for problems with 64 bit applications, since they cannot use the 32 bit OleDb (or ODBC) driver.
Building and Consuming REST API Services with FoxPro
REST API Services are no longer a novelty, but have become the standard way for organizations to publishing services for remote access. Whether it's public APIs both free and commercial, as well as SPA apps that use internal APIs for a backend, REST's simplicity and loose suggestions has won out of more complex service architectures of the past. In this article from Virtual FoxFest 2021 I talk about how you can access REST services from FoxPro and how to create REST services using FoxPro and Web Connection.
Should we add Bootstrap 5.0 Support to Web Connection?
Bootstrap 5 has been out for a while now and it was time to take it for a spin on the West Wind Message board application to see what's required to upgrade a Web Connection application to use Bootstrap 5. Here is review, some thoughts and some of my update notes.
Workaround for horrendously slow SUBSTR Character Parsing in FoxPro
FoxPro's string speed is reasonably good for most operations. But one shortcoming is character by character parsing which can only be accomplished via the `SUBSTR()` command, which as it turns out is horribly slow when strings get large. In this post I describe the problem and offer a couple of solutions to get better character by character parsing speed for string iteration.
FoxPro Date Rounding Errors in COM and .NET
FoxPro dates can be finicky when travelling over COM and COM Interop for .NET. Ran into a nasty issue with dates from cursors showing up as slightly rounded date values in .NET which lose some of the document definition. Here's what the problem is and how you can work around it in .NET.