Thursday, April 7, 2011

April 12, 2011--Double-header

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, April 12 at 7:00 PM. As usual, feel free to come any time after 6:30 and bring something to eat.

We have a double-header this month. Garth Groft will a look at his adventures in moving an application to the Web. Jim Walsh will present “An example of developing a COM server in VFP”.

Here are the bios and abstracts:

Garth Groft is currently the lead developer and owner of MicroComputer Task Group (MCTG) located in York Pa. With 22 years of custom Fox and Visual Fox programming experience, he has been a consultant, a contract programmer, and leader of a nine man development team. Clients include Fortune 500 companies. The company has an International applications user base numbering well over a1000 users in most every county worldwide. In addition to IT consulting and applications development, MCTG has a strong knowledge base of HVAC (Heating, Ventilating, and Air-Conditioning), heat transfer, numerical analysis, statistical analysis and CAD (Computer Aided Design). The company is currently focused on developing cost-effective strategies and solutions for porting VFP applications to the web. This strategy addresses growing interest by clients in "cloud" applications accessible via mobile devices while maintaining VFP as an integral part of the solution. Protecting my clients’ investments in VFP applications is also key to this strategy. The RAD advantages of VFP are ported to the web.

Garth's presentation centers on an invoice payment application developed in two distinct VFP-based web servers, VFP2IIS and FoxInCloud. FoxInCloud utilizes West Wind Web Connect, Active Widgets and FoxInCloud's own unique Application Adapter Assistant.

Jim Walsh has a PhD in Physiology and Biophysics, and an MS in Physics. He is an independent consultant specializing in biomedical, scientific and engineering applications, primarily in VFP and C++.

Jim's talk is entitled “An example of developing a COM server in VFP”. COM servers represent a good strategy for providing functionality that is needed by several programs written in different languages. Jim will describe the development of a COM server that provides access to the data in a Firebird database for VFP and C++ clients. Visual FoxPro makes developing COM servers relatively easy. It hides many of the underlying details. But, can the things hidden by the Fox come back to bite you?