On Microsoft Watch today, Mary Jo Foley posted an update to an earlier article, talking about Fox, its positioning within MS, and what its strengths are.

You are the Fourth Doctor: A walking Bohemian
conundrum with a brooding personal magnetism
and a first-rate intellect concealed somewhere
beneath your charmingly goofy exterior. You are
perhaps the most terribly clever of all the
Doctors, though your occasional bouts of
childishness get you in trouble. You never go
looking for a fight, but when someone messes
with you… good heavens, are they ever sorry
they did.

Which Incarnation of the Doctor Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Last night, there was a huge flash of light and loud explosion over Puget Sound. Scientists have determined that it was most probably a meteor which was about the size of a computer monitor. KOMO 4 News has links to security videos around the area which show the explosion — one of the cameras even seems to catch part of the meteor that didn’t participate in the big explosion.

Here’s a little sample I put together that will display every font on your system in that font (within reason :-) ). It doesn’t work perfectly, but for 16 lines of code, I’m not complaining too loudly. :-) If I wanted it to be robust, I’d check in the EvaluateContents method to make sure that I was actually in the Detail band before changing the font. There are a couple of other tweaks you can make to improve things: it’s left as an exercise to the reader to figure out what they are. :-)

CREATE CURSOR crsrFontList ( ;
 cFont char(32))

llGotFonts = AFONT(laFonts)
FOR i = 1 TO ALEN(laFonts)
 INSERT INTO crsrFontList VALUES (laFonts(i))
ENDFOR

CREATE REPORT fontList FROM DBF("crsrFontList")

loListen = CREATEOBJECT("myFontListener")

REPORT FORM fontList PREVIEW OBJECT loListen 

DEFINE CLASS myFontListener as ReportListener
 ListenerType = 1

 PROCEDURE EvaluateContents
  LPARAMETERS nFrxRecno, oObjProperties

  oObjProperties.FontName = ALLTRIM(cFont)
  oObjProperties.Reload = .T.
 ENDPROC
ENDDEFINE

Update: *sigh* You think if I post it enough times, I’ll finally get it right?

Update: See above *sigh*.

The free public beta of Visual FoxPro 9 has just been released for download from MSDN. If you have an application that works with data, you owe it to yourself to take a look at this to see what Fox can do for you.

Some of the new features:

• Greatly enhanced SQL standards compliance
• Greatly improved report writer — multiple detail bands, on-the-fly report customization, etc.
• New data types for enhanced interoperability with back end data
• Many previous limits in product (array size, nesting levels, etc.) removed

As some of you may have inferred from previous posts, I’m a temporary contractor at Microsoft, and have been working with 9 for some time. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone else get as excited as I’ve been. :-)