Here’s an update to the ‘Visual Foxpro to Real Studio Converter’. I’ve just released version 0.2Beta.

There are numerous updates including:

• The Real Studio project now properly identifies the forms as belonging to the project.
• More controls are converted such as the Option Groups and Image Controls
• The method code for the forms and command buttons are converted into the Real Studio Windows, but are commented out. This should make it so you can manually convert your code into RealBasic.
• The project is now under the MIT license which is very open and friendly.

I hope that you find the project interesting, and … helpful! If you make enhancements, or find a bug, just let me know.

I hope that you find Real Studio as easy and fun to develop in as I do.

-Kevin

One of the technologies that I’m moving to is Real Studio (RealBasic) by Real Software Inc., located in Austin, TX, USA. The joy and productivity that I had in VFP, I find in RS. Did I mention that it’s cross platform: Linux, Mac and Windows! There’s even a web edition!

Anyway, wouldn’t you wish that there was a utility to convert your VFP forms over to Real Studio? Well wish no more! Take a look.

Still here? Okay, lets look at the pros and cons:

PROS:

1. Converts your forms over from VFP to RS
2. Keeps the controls naming convention
3. The converter is free to use!
4. The converter is open sourced in that if there is a bug you could even fix it yourself and keep going!

Cons:

1. Not all controls are supported just yet.
2. Only converts forms; no reports, labels, menus, classes, programs
3. None of the method or even code code is converted
4. Not tested on heavily subclassed forms
5. Doesn’t make you taller or better looking
6. Who the hell is Kevin Cully anyway?

Well anyway, I do really like Real Studio and I hope you find this converter interesting. If you find a bug or need an enhancement, please drop me a line. It helps to incentivize me if you would tell me how this would make the world a better place for you. If you find (and fix) a bug or make an enhancement, let me know and give back! We can make version 0.2beta even better!

Download the VFPtoRS source code here! Version 0.1beta [60k]

Oh yes, I’m also speaking at the Real World Conference in May 2012 in Orlando. Come on down and learn more about Real Studio! If you are a VFP developer, I think you’ll like using it as a development platform as much as I do.

Thanks everyone!

No graphics show in Real Studio IDE on Ubuntu 11.04

A small problem however. No graphic images show up in the Real Studio interface. I switched Ubuntu back to GNOME classic thinking it may have been the Unity interface causing the problem. No good. The images in the IDE still were not showing up. Perhaps it was because I did an “Upgrade” from 10.10 to 11.04.

This upgrade takes a LOOOONG time because of the download time to get all of those files. I recommend doing a fresh install of Ubuntu. By downloading using a torrent, the ISO comes down in minutes. Install onto a flash drive and an install takes about 30 minutes total. With the upgrade route, you’re looking at a couple of hours.

I did a fresh install of 11.04 and still no good. I did a fresh install of 10.10 and … the images were there. I liked GNOME better than the current Unity interface anyway.

Please don’t think I’m bad mouthing Real Studio. William Yu responded quickly to my posting on the forum and they’ll be looking into it and will probably have it corrected for Real Studio 2011 release 2. Especially if I help them test in the next beta cycle. Yup, I can be of help for the issues that affect me. This is a situation where the rapid release cycle, and an open beta-testing program really helps.

This issues, I’m sure are a small one. Probably having to do somehow with the internal representation of pathing to the graphics that appear in the IDE. Straighten that out and Real Studio is back in business. In the mean time, hold off on upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 if you do development in Linux until the next release.

I’ll be speaking on “REAL Studio for the VFP Developer”. As all of you know, I love me some Visual Foxpro. The Visual Foxpro development team has done an incredible job with that product over the many many years of it’s active development. Thank you Fox Software! And yes, a big ‘Thank You’ to MicroSoft for version 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and (especially) 9 of Visual Foxpro! Many, many sincere gratitudes go out to all of the VFPX developers as well keeping the progress of the open-sourced parts of Foxpro going! The hard labors of genius developers are moving Foxpro forward.

So, what you won’t hear at my presentation in May is that I want you to abandon Visual Foxpro for REAL Studio.

What you will hear, is that I do think you should add REAL Studio to your development toolbox. I found that my Visual Foxpro skills and Visual Foxpro mindset is a natural fit for the REAL Studio development environment. I find that joy in development that I have doing Visual Foxpro, I can also have in REAL Studio.

What I’ll be going over in the presentation:

• How VFP and REAL Studio compare
• What are the strengths of REAL Studio
• What are the weaknesses of REAL Studio
• Development ‘gotchas’ in REAL Studio
• How to build a desktop application from scratch
• How to call one window from another
• How to access databases
• How to create and run a report
• How to build for target Linux, Mac and Windows platforms
• A small bit about building Web Applications with REAL Studio
• More!

If you are in the Detroit area, on Thursday May 12th, please stop in and say ‘hello’!

End Function

You can see that there are many parameters passed to the CellTextPaint method of the ListBox object. In my example, I was adding a “” as a flag to the RowTag of the listbox. If the rowtag had that flag, it was a refund and we set the graphics object to have a forecolor of a dark red, and set the Italics to be true.

What originally threw me is that I have to think of g (Graphics object) as the “row”. A bit misleading but you can see it is very easy to adjust the font on a listbox. I hope this helps someone out! Even if it’s a future version of me!

While setting it up, one of the tools I have to install is REAL Studio (REALbasic). Well, the DEB file says it won’t install because it isn’t 32bit Linux. I’ve installed it on 64bit Linux before but I hadn’t published the notes so this is a great opportunity to get caught up. Here are the simple steps I followed:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs


If you are going to be using the HTML Viewer in your application, make sure to run:
sudo apt-get install libwebkit*


Then download the latest REAL Studio TGZ file to your local hard drive. Then from the command prompt launch Nautilus as administrator:
gksudo nautilus

My file was downloaded to /home/kcully/Downloads, so I navigated there and double clicked on the REAL Studio TGZ file. This opened up the “Archive Manager”. I clicked the “Extract” button and extracted the files into the /opt/ folder. This is where REAL Studio is normally installed to when using the DEB files so I figure it’s good to keep consistent with the normal installation. Once extracted, the REAL Studio application was already marked as an executable. I just created a launcher for my toolbar and I’m ready to rock! REAL Studio launched, I entered my license information and I’m good to go.

I hope this helps out fellow REAL Studio Linux developers!

ctEggTimer v1.6 for Winders
ctEggTimer v1.6 for Linux

Today was different, however. I am working on an application that needs to validate a domain name. I should note that this is just for US based domain names so I haven’t coded it for Unicode. That’s for another day. Take a look how easy it is to do in Real Studio:

DIM cDomainName AS String = "Reg+#(Ex Is Hard, and you!can'tClean$This*@*(#String"
DIM cNewDomain AS String = ""
DIM oRegEx AS NEW RegEx
oRegEx.SearchPattern = "[^A-Za-z0-9-.]" // Basically allow any alphanumeric characters plus a dash and a dot
oRegEx.ReplacementPattern = ""
oRegEx.Options.ReplaceAllMatches = True
cNewDomain = oRegEx.Replace( cDomainName )


There. I’m a RegEx expert! Right?!?! Perhaps not. But this is a great simple introduction to RegEx for us mere-mortals.

Here’s the magic to get this to run.


cd /tmp
wget http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/i/ia32-libs/ia32-libs_2.7ubuntu6.1_amd64.deb
dpkg-deb -x ia32-libs_2.7ubuntu6.1_amd64.deb ia32-libs
sudo cp ia32-libs/usr/lib32/libstdc++.so.5.0.7 /usr/lib/
cd /usr/lib
sudo ln -s libstdc++.so.5.0.7 libstdc++.so.5


I’ve made a slight adjustment to the commands above to make reference to the Ubuntu 10.04 directory structure of /usr/lib instead of the /usr/lib32

Good luck geeky people!

The major enhancement is the addition of warning sounds. This was based on a suggestion where a conference presenter wanted to be warned close to the ending of his session so he could give a good wrap-up. See. The timer is used in unexpected ways! I love that.

The settings are also now saved in a SQLite database named ctEggTimer.rsd. You can access it via any SQLite Database manager and see what is inside of it. Basically, it is used to save your settings and reload them when the Egg Timer is restarted.

I’m next going to be working on major enhancements for version 2.0. I’m hoping to have better notification of the end of the timer, sound selection, and more. If you have an enhancement request, just email me and I’ll do my best to include it in version 2.0.

I also may make version 2.0 “for sale”. I’ve always been curious on whether this will work out, so this is a social experiment as well. I will probably sell version 2.0 for $3US or something like that. We’ll see whether people will pay a “micro” payment for a small utility program.

Downloads here:

• ctEggTimer for Winders [1.7M]
• ctEggTimer for Linux [1.6M]
• ctEggTimer for Mac [13M]

The ctEggTimer application is written in REAL Studio 2010r1!

Thanks!
-Kevin