An irreverent look at how Visual FoxPro really works, this guide gives developers insight into every command, function, event, and method of version 7.0, including Service Pack One. Recognized within the FoxPro developer community as the indispensable resource for serious FoxPro development, this updated edition covers Visual FoxPro's Power Tools and the various components of the language, including Xbase traditions and assumptions. Also included are hardware tips and optimization guidelines. Subjects such as Active technologies as they relate to VFP, the Class Browser and Component Gallery, VFP's Builder and Wizard technologies, and VFP's version of IntelliSense are covered in detail.

We love Visual FoxPro. We'd rather use it to develop applications than any other product we've ever worked with.

But (isn't there always a "but"?) Visual FoxPro isn't perfect. Some parts of the language don't work as they should. Others do what they're supposed to, but we can't imagine why anyone thinks you'd want to do that. And some pieces do exactly what they're supposed to and it's a good thing to do, but it's hard as heck to understand. We should add that the Visual FoxPro documentation is good—in fact, it gets better with each new version—but there are still too many places where it's incorrect, incomplete, or sometimes a bit incomprehensible.

Enter this book. This is the book for the times when you've done just as the manual shows, but it still doesn't work and you're running out of hair to pull out. It's for those days when you think you've found a command that does what you need, but you can't make any sense of what Help has to say about it. We'll tell you how it really works or why you shouldn't do it the way the manual shows—or tell you that it doesn't work at all, and show you how to do it another way.