SweetPotato Software Blog

The Visual FoxPro Grid ControlI’ve often been heard to say that Visual FoxPro’s grid is one of the greatest controls ever devised. I still feel that way, but wouldn’t it be nice if some of the functionality that our customers want implemented in the grid came stock? You know, features like: sorting, filtering, incremental search, saving user preferences, and exporting to Excel. […]

Same Old, Same OldFar too often developers will either not implement error handling in their applications (allowing VFP’s default error handler to prevail) or they will display a simple messagebox containing a few pieces of error information such as the values returned from Visual FoxPro’s Error(), Message() and Lineno() functions. In either case, this type of error handling is usually woefully inadequate. […]

Getting the Longitude and Latitude for an AddressJust finished answering a question out on UniversalThread regarding how to get the Longitude and Latitude from an address. Following is the Visual FoxPro code I came up with for doing it. I’m posting it here simply so I can find it later (maybe a few readers will find it interesting or useful too). […]

The ProblemsVisual FoxPro 9.0’s APPEND FROM and COPY TO commands are incompatible with the new Excel 2007 file formats (XLS, XLSX, XLSB, and XLSM). You may have noticed that I included XLS which you would think is supported, but just try saving your Excel 97-2003 XLS workbook in compatibility mode in Excel 2007 and then using the APPEND FROM command […]

I’m sure you’ve seen it on the news by now or somewhere else on the internet, but if not then here is a link… http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=143041 I was on my way back from my daughter’s baby shower while Claire and my two youngest children sought saftety in the basement of our home in Forest Lake, MN. It was a scarey deal. […]

Incomplete DirectionsIf you read the contents of the Readme.txt that comes with Sedna, you would think that the DDEX Provider can be registered for Visual Studio 2005 by simply shelling out to the command prompt and running the included RegDDEX.exe. Unfortunately, following the outlined steps to the letter will result in very little. In short, the “Microsoft FoxPro Database File […]

Windows RSS Platform While I could go into detail about the Windows RSS Platform here, it is much easier for me to point you to the source which says in part… “…As part of the RSS support in Internet Explorer 7, users can discover and subscribe to RSS feeds within the browser. When the user subscribes to a feed, it […]

Backing Up Data One of the most important and simplest things a user of a desktop database application can do is to maintain a current backup of the application’s database. However, if the user doesn’t have some sort of software or hardware that makes an automatic backup on a schedule it is usually up to the software developer to implement […]

VFPCompression Update This update contains fixes to problems surrounding relative paths when compressing folders and files that are not relative to one another or the zip file being created. Previous to this version developers needed to send in .T. for the lIgnorePath parameter when calling functions in order to zip files and folders that were not relative. This was not […]

VFP StudioSince posting the countdown, I’ve been fielding lots of questions regarding VFP Studio. Some of the mystery surrounding VFP Studio has been on purpose and some of it has been because we (Bo Durban and I) are not yet sure what all is possible working within the framework provided by Microsoft via the Visual Studio Isolated Shell. However, in […]