Prague DevCon 2009

Many sessions show how to develop applications with VFP. But what has to be done, to create powerful and stable applications? What makes an application a professional one? What do our customers expect? In this session we want to give answers to these questions.

Professional applications should have a user interface which must meet several requirements. We will discuss what is important for our customers and what makes our applications easier to sell.

What has to be considered when deploying an application to thousands of customers? Can we create applications that start directly from CD-ROM? How can we update applications for many customers? How can the structure of a database be updated?

What about security? We must secure our source code as well as our customer's data. What problems do we have to be aware of, when using reportbehavior 90 at the customer site?

Error handling is another important feature of applications. Finally, we want to know what happens at the customer sites

It is all about data! All the user interface, all the business rules, all the reports … Everything around us is based on long years gathered and thoroughly kept data. Mighty data! Love them, bow to them, drive them!

It was relative late, when we, VFP programmers, had received object oriented data access means - Cursoradapter class. And yet we have it, so let's take it! Cursoradapter class is available in VFP since its version 8.0 yet again outfield. This session will not discuss basics of Cursoradapter class. We will focus on refinements, tips and tricks in its usage.

Either concerning connecting data sources or using the class to applying business rules to data, it is a great tool to dig deep into data, having all the power of object oriented programming

The design of user interfaces is the biggest challenge when developing applications. The user interface is the only thing which is visible for the users of our applications. So the user interface is the most important feature if we intend to win new customers. But also if the users of our applications are known in advance the user interface should be designed well. The users should solve their business cases fast, simple, and intuitive.

We will discuss modern user interfaces and how to realize them with VFP. We will also discuss the 8 DBI ActiveX controls which come with Sedna. These controls are powerful and enable us to create good-looking user interfaces.

The implementation of a ribbon bar similar to Office 2007 applications if a special challenge for VFP developers. Based on VFPX example we will show how a ribbon bar can be realized with native VFP.

At the end we will show how future user interfaces, realized with WPF, may look.