Introduction

When Visual Foxpro 3.0 came onto the scene in July of 1995, it was a radically different product from its predecessor, Foxpro 2.6. In fact, most people thought of Visual Foxpro 3.0 to be a 1.0 release, instead of a 3.0 release. This being the case, it has put in place a tremendous learning curve on the part of the development community. As you will see however, this is a good thing! Visual Foxpro 3.0 is a extremely powerful development environment and is worth the extra time it will take to learn about its new features and capabilities. We are now in release 5.0a of Visual Foxpro. In the latest release, Microsoft has made VFP even faster (much faster form loads) along with adding some great new features. Some of which are a color coded editer, class mapping, and outer join support. As of this writing, MS is already working on the next release of Visual FoxPro, code named "Tahoe", for the next release of Visual Studio. All of the features that are shown on the screen shots may not be fully described in this manual. What this course will try to accomplish, is to provide a hands- on approach to learning VFP. It will walk you through the process of creating a small VFP application, from laying out the tables and setting relationships, to creating the forms and menus to tie everything together. The disk that accompanies this manual contains a finished version of the application that we will create as well as a directory that contains only the DBF files needed to get things going. It would be best if the contents of the disk are copied to your hard drive. Keep the diskette handy in case you need to restore the original setup. After the class is over, you can take this course back home or to the office to further practice and build your own application using the techniques discussed here. With a little practice, this course will help you become much more proficient at developing VFP applications. We will be using the project manager in VFP to manage all of our project components.

Installing the Sample Code

First create a VFPCLASS directory on your C drive. Then create a START subdirectory and copy the contents of the OPTIMIZED_DATA\EXAMPLES\START directory on the CD. There are subdirectories for data, classes, forms, and progs. Make VFPCLASS\START the default directory by typing the following in the command window: CD C:\VFPCLASS\START The CD DOS command is now available in VFP. This is handier than typing the SET DEFAULT TO command!