Well I run into an interesting problem today using c# to create a Web Service that accesses FoxPro Tables. After getting everything in place, and getting the ASPX file to compile I started getting an ODBC error. Turns out that when you install FoxPro it doesn't necessarily install the actual FoxPro ODBC Drivers, so you get an error when trying to call the open() method.
I will say this, the more I work with .net the more I am liking being forced back to the Case Sensitive and Structured programming arena. I didn't realize just how lazy my development had gotten. Its amazing how much I curse C# for forcing me to type my variables the same every time.....
One more thing, for a Web Server that allows someone to search data, it would be nice to put checks in to see if it even found anything... .Net is picky about trying to access datasets that don't have anything in them....
The past few days I have not really been able to post much because I have been going through a FoxPro App screen by screen removing an Image Object, and 3 ShapeObjects... The app only has 934 Form Objects, and you will probably never guess why I was doing all this work....
First off let me sat this application took me close to 6 years to develop to the point that it's currently at, I initially started off developing it with the plain old Grey on Grey w/ Black text look, but after getting tired of a friend badgering me about how it looked like every other FoxPro App I went in and added a background, and several shapes to create a consistent but colorful look. Well the app has been live for the past 2 years, and people have made some comments about the colors, so this past week I got the hair to make a change to the colors.
So I decided, instead of me controlling the colors I would give the users control by implementing Skins, since I developed the framework as an object oriented structure, it should be pretty easy, just create a table, add some fields for the various values such as font, colors etc..
I then went onto the images, well this turned into a nightmare. I found out that I had 4 different ways that I had put the images on the forms. NOT one of the four was to put these images on the base classes. I have probably 300 forms that had them as objects on the main form, then I had probably 3 other parent forms that had these images on them. To make a long story short, I had to chase down where these images were.
So anyway, as I got into this project I ended up opening each form, and then deleting or at least trying to delete each image and move to the next.
Adding the new image was easy, I used the form property Picture which is what I should have used in the first place. My idiot self created an 800x600 jpg that I then put on every form, instead of creating a 1x600 image that would be tiled across the screen.... needless to say when I got through all this I had reduced the EXE size by nearly 750k or more, and the screens actually performed a hair faster.
So mark one more up on the bonehead tally.... BUT I will say this way also makes developing the screens a little easier too....