Develop an App within 75 MinutesUwe Habermann and Venelina Jordanova

Both speakers are well known protagonists of VFX, which is a Visual FoxPro framework, which was originally designed by someone in Switzerland for Visual FoxPro 3.0. This framework was later bought by ISYS, a German company, well known by its support for the German DevCon. ISYS cared for its further development and also has it had enriched with a great number of enhancements.

Great emphasis was put on using the various features, which were built into Visual FoxPro over the years. Also various wizards and tools were developed or improved with the ease of use and RAD (=Rapid Application Development) in mind. Also the interoperability was a major goal, especially as far as data storage and using the Internet are concerned.

In order to prove, how good this framework, its tools and its wizards had become in the meantime, Uwe and Venelina concentrated on developing an application in 75 minutes. As a blueprint they selected the Pizza Ordering Example, which is included in the Visual FoxPro Sample Solutions (Home()+"\Samples\Com+\QC").

To keep a long story short: Uwe and Venelina solved their task with ease in exactly the time, they had promised to do it, fully demonstrating why VFX 9.0 is said to be a "Rapid Application Development Framework for VFP 9". Some highlights from their presentation:

Version 9.0 (the version number kept in synch with Visual FoxPro) of VFX (stands for VFp eXtended) comes with a Task Pane, with a Template Application and many Builders and Wizards. In order to create an application project the respective Wizard will need the names of the folder, the database, some texts for the about user dialog and a few more settings for the application object. By the way: A Czech-speaking version is also available, i.e. VFX can generate application with a Czech interface! And in additional 12 languages as well... The development package itself including wizards and builders has only an English interface, but that should not be a real obstacle.

Then an application is generated, which contains at Runtime

  • Splash-Screen
  • Login dialog
  • Menu and Toolbar
  • XP style open dialog
  • User management
  • User rights

and much more features...

After creating a database (one table each for customer, orders, orderdetails, products), using the VFP database designer, xCase or SDT the various VFX wizards comes onto the stage to generate all forms needed at runtime (example shown include an order form, a child form), CursorAdapter classes for all tables of a database for VFP database and for SQL Server and the like and off we go and generate an application!

As there is a close integration with AFP (Active FoxPro Pages) via a VFX-AFP Wizard Uwe and Venelina created quickly a web form with a mouse click, which has the same functionality and the same look and feel as its Visual FoxPro counterpart! (VFX 9.0 und VFP 9.0 have to be installed). Well, there are some minor limitations using the Web...

The time was over, the task was accomplished, the presenters were happy, the audience was enthusiastic. Perfect show!

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About the Authors:

Jan Vit

Jan Vit is an 18 years old high school student with interests in computers and programming. In 1993 he had his first 80386 PC with FoxPro 1.02 for DOS and later upgraded to versions 2.0 and 2.5. Since 1999 Jan has been developing applications using Visual FoxPro in versions 3, 6, 7 and 8. He had spoken at several Czech conferences and attended one dFPUG conference in Germany (2001). His work now mainly consists of developing software for pharmacies. Feel free to contact him at his email.

Jan Kral

My name is Jan Kral and I am studying Jaroslav Seifert‘s high school in Prague. I am interested in computers, technique and medical science. In my free time I am developing applications using Visual FoxPro 7,8 and nowadays I am using VFP 9.0. Mostly for my personal use.I attended several Czech FoxPro DevCons. I am also developing internet web pages using PHP, JavaScript and so on. Feel free contact me at