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....
posted @ Monday, January 08, 2007 3:14 PM