Whil Hentzen
If you were fortunate enough to spend a week in the California desert at the beginning of June, you probably saw the first public demonstration of Visual FoxPro 7.0. If you weren’t, or if you’d already had too many margaritas, I’m sure you’ll want to be the first to read about what’s going to be landing on your desk sometime in the foreseeable future.
The editor, general IDE improvements, and Intellisense were the areas in VFP 7 that were shown. Rather than try to narrate an interesting monologue–these features are much more easily described in a visual demo than dry text–I’ll just list them:
• Dock the windows, such as the Command window and the various Debug windows
• Set Breakpoints in an editing window
• Use the Breakpoint Editor in an editing window
• Mark and use shortcuts (kind of like bookmarks in Word) in a long PRG or method
• Find code without using the Find dialog box (highlight a word and then press Ctrl-F)
• Turn markers for white space on or off–for both spaces and tabs
• Option to decide whether to insert tabs or spaces
• Hyperlinks are automatically recognized in the Editor
• Procedure/Function list is now modeless, so it floats above an editor window
• Control-click drills into a container instead of having to right-click, edit, right-click, edit, and so on!
• Can combine multiple windows into one window with tabs to move between them–thus you can jam multiple windows into, for example, the Data Session window
• Intellisense has been added–it auto-corrects and auto-finishes as you type, and displays lists of parameters that are available
When will it arrive?
There are typically two questions that are asked at this point. The first, of course, is, "When will version 7.0 ship?" And, naturally, the answer is, "I don’t know." Seriously, remember that VFP 7 is part of the Visual Studio family (you asked for it, so you got it!), and thus, even if 7.0 were ready tomorrow, it would have to wait until everything else in VS 7.0 was ready–and that could be a while.
Is that all there is?
Of course not, silly reader. 6.0 was just released eight months ago! This sneak preview was just that–a small glimpse. And, if you were paying attention, you noticed that everything had to do with the user interface. I bet there will be improvements and enhancements in many areas of the product. Just hold your horses. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more features unveiled at strategic times in the future.
Don’t forget SP3!
And remember that Service Pack 3 was just released, and it has a lot of goodies in it–if you haven’t picked it up yet, you’ll want to be sure to do so. There’s a new multi-threaded runtime, a data session base class, type library binding, runtime compiler support, and a whole raft of bug fixes, including lots of "C5" errors and some multi-user problems that have been around since 3.0.
There’s also a Y2K fix for Visual FoxPro 5.0 and a FoxPro 2.6 patch for fast Pentiums, both also available from Microsoft’s Web site. The development team certainly hasn’t been goofing around since 6.0 was shipped, have they?
Whil Hentzen is the editor of FoxTalk.