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-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------November Letter from the Editor :D
Mark your calendar for the Advisor Visual FoxPro DevCon 2004 conference, which is scheduled to be held October 2004 in Las Vegas, Nevada. More details will be coming shortly for this conference. The Visual FoxPro team is very busy working on the next version of Visual FoxPro, code-named Europa. Because DevCon 2004 is planned near the time we hope to release Europa, DevCon 2004 is where the Visual FoxPro team will formally launch Europa.
As I promised in last month's letter, I will be going into new, detailed information about Europa this month. Disclaimer: This is an early sneak preview at the Europa product, which is not yet in beta. Some of the features mentioned may not make it into the product. The list below is intended only as a partial set of the features we expect to include in the product when it's finally released.
One of our objectives for Europa was to base most of the enhancements on customer feedback (e.g., online wish lists) similar to what we did for Visual FoxPro 8.0. The next version will contain a number of great improvements to the data engine, including new data types and extensions to the SQL language. Europa will provide new UI features, such as Docking Forms, to greatly enhance the end user experience. You will also see extended interoperability with SQL Server, and better XML support to improve .NET interoperability. And, as was the case with Visual FoxPro 8.0, you can expect Europa to maintain backwards compatibility with prior versions of Visual FoxPro. Here are more details for some of these enhancements.
End User UI Features
Ability to dock user forms
Anchor controls to adjust when a form is resized
Wordwrap support for text in check boxes
Bind a list box to a collection
Fine-tune position and spacing of image/text on buttons
Rotate a label
AutoComplete entries in text boxes
Create polygon shapes and Bezier curves
Developer Productivity
Create arrays with greater than 65K elements
Have greater than 128 DO nesting levels
Property Sheet extensions:
Favorites tab
Custom property editors
Property capitalization
Improved IntelliSense:
WITH_ENDWITH support
Available in memo fields and at run time
Background compile current line
Data/XML Enhancements
New data types: Varchar, Varbinary, Blob
SQL language enhancements (e.g., greater than nine joins, multiple subquery levels, support for buffered data)
New Binary index type for DELETED()
CAST() and ICASE() functions
Auto-refresh of data from back-ends (great for those times when you use identity keys in SQL Server and want to get the key value back right after adding a new row)
Improvements to XMLAdapter, including nested hierarchical XML, extended XSD schemas, and XPath scripting
One of the exciting areas we are spending significant resources on for Europa is the Visual FoxPro Report Designer (actually, reporting in general). While we did add a number of great Report Designer enhancements to Visual FoxPro 8.0, you ain't seen nothin' yet! Based on your valuable customer feedback, we have come up with what we feel is a very compelling story.
Europa Reporting Goals
Protect existing FRX investments
Provide an open architecture that is extensible at both design time and run time
Offer a better reuse story
Extend and open the design-time experience
Provide run-time access to report elements and events via objects
Allow more flexibility with report chaining
Provide new output types (e.g., XML, HTML) and the ability to plug in new ones
Improve and open print preview mechanism
As you may have noticed, the Europa Reporting model will follow architecture along the same lines as many of our other designers—one that is open and extensible. We know that there are many features more suited for a third party to provide. We hope that this new open architecture offers unlimited potential for folks to extend their reporting needs. Here are more specific details on some of the new reporting features for Europa.
Report Designer Features
Multiple detail bands
Design-time events, such as opening a report, making a quick report, dropping on a field, changing page layout, etc.
Ability to use a custom Report Builder for processing of design-time events. The possibilities for custom Builders are endless. For example, you can use a Report Builder to change Grid Scale from inches to centimeters, add a watermark by using absolute positioning, drop on a custom object that renders a chart or rotates a label, etc.
Ability to set design-time protection at run time to prevent end users from making various types of modifications to objects on a report (e.g., edit, move, delete)
Improved preservation of FRX (e.g., User field) for folks wishing to extend the structure
Improved Zoom capabilities for Print Preview (10 - 500%)
Miscellaneous UI improvements, including better menus, toolbars, and ToolTips
Improved use of the DataEnvironment
New output types, including XML and HTML
Better international support, such as font script setting (FontCharSet)
You can expect even more great Reporting enhancements to be included in Europa beyond just the list above. We also have many exciting enhancements in other areas of the product that we'll announce at a future date. To ensure that Europa is the most stable release of Visual FoxPro ever, we will be extending the development and quality control schedule for Europa by several months. Europa is scheduled to be released during the second half of 2004. Fortunately, you will not have to wait that long to start playing with many of the new features mentioned above. There will be a public beta of Europa for free download available during the first half of 2004. For even more details on Europa beyond the list above, refer to the Universal Thread Germany DevCon 2003 conference report.
Many of you have asked about Visual FoxPro and .NET. Currently, there are no plans to have Europa be based on the Windows .NET Framework nor to be integrated into Visual Studio. However, you can be confident that Europa will continue to have a great interoperability story with .NET. The Visual FoxPro team is very excited about Europa and very much appreciate of all the great feedback you have given us to help make this the best version of Visual FoxPro ever!
As a reminder, Visual FoxPro 8.0 is supported by Microsoft until 2010 in the developer tools lifecycle support plan. In my December letter next month, I will go into more detail on some of the new Europa features listed above.
Ken Levy
VS Data Product Manager
Microsoft
E-mail: klevy@microsoft.com
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