CULLY Technologies, LLC

Visual Foxpro to Real Studio Converter – 0.2beta

kcully — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 20:25:35 +0000

Hello Visual Foxpro Programmers,

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

Visual Foxpro to Real Studio Converter – 0.1beta

kcully — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:18:37 +0000

I love Visual Foxpro. Let me throw that out there right now and right up front. Unfortunately, Microsoft isn’t going to continue to develop Visual Foxpro and official support is scheduled to end in 2015. Sure, there will be VFP applications that continue to run for years to come. But, where do you go when you’ve got years of VFP applications developed?

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:

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

Cons:

Not all controls are supported just yet.
Only converts forms; no reports, labels, menus, classes, programs
None of the method or even code code is converted
Not tested on heavily subclassed forms
Doesn’t make you taller or better looking
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!

Boxee Power Consumption

kcully — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:10:50 +0000

Hello TV fans!

I’m about to make a change to my A/V setup inside of my house. I was curious about how this would affect my power consumption. Out comes my Kill A WATT and I roll up my sleeve and go to work.

First, lets take a look at the TV just for comparison purposes. I’ve got a Vizio 47″ LCD TV.

Powered Off: 0.0a; 0.0w
On w no video feed blue screen: 1.7a; 209w
On to cable news show: 1.5a; 185w

I have a HTPC (Home Theater PC) that is an old Hewlett Packard business type PC. Not a video game setup but also not designed for low power. So without further ado, here’s the power consumption for comparison purposes:

Powered Off: 0.0a; 0.0w
On but not doing anything: 0.9a; 102w
On and playing a movie: 1.0a; 114w

So, what I’m going to be retiring soon is one of the two satellite providers. This is NOT an HD DVR, but it does have two tuners. These DVRs are famous for using a lot of power so I was curious about its consumption.

Powered Off: 0.4a; 31w
Powered on: 0.4a; 32w
Recording 1 show: 0.4a; 32w
Recording 2 shows: 0.4a; 32w

Interesting results here but not that surprising. If you think about it, this DVR is recording shows all the time but throwing the show away if I’m not setting it to record. I think this is why the power consumption is not that different from when it is ‘asleep’ and when it is recording shows including two shows at once.

So, lets take a look at the Boxee power consumption. I’ve got the Boxee Live TV USB dongle to let me play OTA (Over The Air) shows. Also, on that system, I’ll be playing shows over the Internet and via Netflix.

Powered Off: 0.0a; 0.0w
Powered On w Live TV USB: 0.2a; 13w
Powered On w/o Live TV USB: 0.2a; 13w
Sleep w/o Live TV USB: 0.2a; 11w
Sleep w Live TV USB: 0.2a; 13w
Playing Netflix show: 0.2a; 11w
Playing Internet show: 0.2a; 12w

There you go. The Boxee Box is quite conservative with power consumption. I’d guess that since this box is so quiet. There is some sort of fan, but it must be very small. The satellite DVR uses twice the power as the Boxee Box but that’s not too bad considering that it’s spinning a physical hard drive in the box, plus the fan. My HTPC is the pig in the story, but it also wasn’t designed to be low power.

The cost per year for these systems is very low, but I thought it would be a very interesting comparison to make. Bottom line, the TV is the big pig of this group.

Google Merchant Data Feed Update

kcully — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:27:28 +0000

I have a client that lives and dies with Google for his business. Adwords, organics, and Shopping Results are key to driving traffic and orders through his business.

On September 22nd, Google is updating their requirements for the feed they accept for their Merchant accounts. We were successfully uploading over 6,000 items into their feeds previously and I needed to check that our feed would be accepted.

Luckily for me, Google recently added the ability to ‘test’ the data feed. I tried our old feed: 0 (zero) items imported. After taking a closer look at the new requirements, basically there was a re-arranging of the deck chairs. I created a new data feed, with new captions and a couple of their new required fields. Still 0 (zero) items imported.

After scaling down my test from 6,000+ items to 10, I was able to quickly turn test iterations around and found the simple solution to get the import to work. The past data feed required double quotes around strings in their TAB delimited format. This new format requires that there not be any double quotes at all. Basically the TAB character does all delineation between fields. Make sure that none of your fields include a TAB character in any of the strings or you’ll lose that record on the import.

Simple solution but it took me a small bit to figure out the difference from the old feed to the new one. I hope this post saves you a few minutes as well.

Real Studio not ready for Ubuntu 11.04 … yet.

kcully — Wed, 04 May 2011 14:31:46 +0000

I recently upgraded my test laptop from Ubuntu 10.10 to Ubuntu 11.04 with the new Unity interface. I’m going to take this laptop to the Detroit Area Users Group for a demonstration of Real Studio and I thought I’d demonstrate it on the latest and greatest Ubuntu.

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.

World Memory Project – Windows Only – WTH?

kcully — Wed, 04 May 2011 12:05:44 +0000

You may not know this factoid about me, but I’ve been researching my family history, doing the whole Genealogy thing. Ancestry.com is an almost ‘must have’ subscription to help speed along the research. You can do a lot with free web sites and lots of research, but Ancestry.com helps.

I received an email from them describing the World Archives Memory Project.

The World Memory Project uses software and processes developed by the Ancestry World Archives Project, an established community that has spent years helping to preserve historical documents and make them available online for free.
It starts with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum creating digital images of historical documents. Then, using special software developed by Ancestry.com, contributors like you help make these documents searchable online by typing or “keying” information from the digital images into a database.

Cool. I love to give back. I’d love to be able to help others research their forefathers, especially when it will be made available for free. I’m a good typist and I can code tags or whatever is needed. I’m ready to sign up and get more information on what I need to do…

The software is Windows only. Dang. Really? This is 2011. They describe that Mac users need to run this in a Virtual Machine. I’m a big Linux user and I could do the same thing but … dang. I know they’ve just lost a *LOT* of their contributors right there! A good number of their potential customers won’t know what a virtual machine is, even though Parallels is pretty easy.

I was hoping to be able to type in the information in OpenOffice (Libre Office) and then paste it into a web form, or even use some sort of AJAXy web application to enter the information. If I’ve got to start up a Virtual Machine, and probably one just to install this software on, and *then* hope it submits correctly to their service, well, that’s too much work.

I’m disappointed. I was hoping to be able to help some people out but I’m thinking this is too much work now. I’ve got a business to run, and I already volunteer a lot of my time to charity. I’m sorry customers of World Archives Project! It’s a darn shame.

Linux notify-send – time parameter ignored

kcully — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 19:51:38 +0000

I’m trying to add some notification capabilities to a cross-platform application that I am building. On Linux I was happy to find the notify-send utility which does a nice job of notifying the user that something occurred inside of the application. Something was strange about it though. The expiration-time parameter is ignored. No matter what I set the -t option to be, the notification still displayed the same duration of time.

notify-send -t 10 "Header" "Body"

After Googling around for a while, I ran across a message board confirming what I was suspecting. Evidently this has been the behavior since 2009 at least and people are asking for a change in the documentation.

I would agree that the documentation should be changed to reflect the current state of the command. I’m a bit sad that this change has been needed for several years now and someone hasn’t been able to get the change in the documentation, or better yet, change the command so the notification timeout is honored.

I hope this helps someone else confirm this behavior more quickly than I was able.

Speaking at DAFUG on 12 May 2011

kcully — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:06:00 +0000

Rick Schummer reached out to me and asked me if I would speak to the Detroit Area Foxpro Users Group. I was delighted to accept that offer. I didn’t want to make the announcement before Rick did so … mum was the word. The announcement went out so I can now blab all I want!

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’!

How many Foxpro Developers are there?

kcully — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:42:32 +0000

I was one of the presenters this past weekend at the 2011 REAL Studio Summit in Atlanta, Georgia and I was comparing Microsoft Visual Foxpro and REAL Studio. I got the question “How many Visual Foxpro developers are out there?” I’m afraid that I stumbled all over the answer and finally ended up with an “I don’t know” type of answer.

I’m very unsatisfied with my answer. In the end, the “I don’t know” and “We’ll never know” is the ultimate answer but lets take a closer look at why that is the case.

Let me start off by saying that I have only ever purchased one copy of Visual Foxpro. One. Ever. So I get counted as “1“. To make matters worse, I believe that version was Visual Foxpro 9.0 when it was first released and I got some sort of huge discount at the time. I admit that I have been a professional Foxpro and Visual Foxpro developer since about 1992 and I have only purchased one version of Visual Foxpro and it was one of the last versions that Microsoft has published. I will posit that I have been a legal Foxpro owner all along.

The ultimate reason is how Foxpro and Visual Foxpro was sold. In the early days Foxpro was sold stand alone. All of those years, each company that I was employed with purchased a copy of Foxpro per developer. I wasn’t the independent consultant at that time. At that time, counts of Foxpro developers were possible.

Once Visual Foxpro 5.0 came along, it was bundled with Visual Studio. Yes, you could purchase Visual Foxpro stand-alone but it made best financial sense to just purchase all of Visual Studio. By Microsoft’s own admission, they didn’t count a sale of Visual Studio as a ‘user’ of Foxpro. However, if I recall correctly they *did* count them as users of Visual Basic.

Soon, Microsoft came out with their MSDN subscription which basically was a mountain of CDs of every OS, development tool, and piece of software produced by Microsoft. To have a years worth of updates for Windows, SQL Server along with Foxpro was very appealing. Again, many many developers and companies purchased the MSDN subscription and the Foxpro developers went uncounted.

By the time I went on my own as an independent consultant, Microsoft has the ‘Empower’ program. It was basically the MSDN program but for small business owners and software developers intent on creating and selling software products. I subscribed to that for many years and was never counted as a Foxpro developer.

Lets take a look for a moment at Foxpro itself. Foxpro doesn’t require registration with Microsoft. It doesn’t phone home. There is a way to report errors back to Microsoft, but that’s optional. Most of the time, I don’t report my Foxpro crashes/errors back to Microsoft. Bottom line, is that Foxpro can be pirated without Microsoft knowing. China is a huge user of Foxpro based on some indicators but their sales of Foxpro is almost non-existant. Not too many sales of Microsoft products in China either. There are a lot of Foxpro developers in Russia and the Eastern European countries.

Heck, there’s a lot of Foxpro developers all over the world. The database power, and low system requirements of VFP make it a great low, middle, and high power development tool.

Being a member of the Atlanta Foxpro Users Group, I know there are hundreds and hundreds (if not thousands) of Foxpro developers in Georgia alone … but we never see them. We’ll see people who have lost their job, they come to one meeting, get a new job even programming with Foxpro, and we never see them again. Frustrating. Don’t programmers want to work on developing their skills in their ‘art’?!?!

I digress.

Is there a way to count Foxpro developers? I don’t think so. We’re many but we’ll never know how many. Any other ideas on how to get a true count of Visual Foxpro developers?

REAL Studio – Listbox Font

kcully — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 16:00:58 +0000

This morning I was looking around for how to adjust the font for a row of sales figures in a listbox. I wanted the refunds to show in red italic, and the regular records to show in the default black font. Luckily REAL Studio makes this easy … as long as you know where to put the code.
Function CellTextPaint(g As Graphics, row As Integer, column As Integer, x as Integer, y as Integer) As Boolean


  IF InStr( me.RowTag( Row ), "") > 0 THEN

    g.ForeColor = RGB( 192, 0, 0 )

    g.Italic = True

  END

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!