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Designed for experienced VFP developers, this course will help you create sophisticated
applications which take full advantage of VFP's advanced features. The focus is on
integration within the Windows environment. Client/server, Internet, OOP and user interface
issues are also fully covered.
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What you will achieve
At the end of the course, delegates who meet the pre-requisites will be able
to develop sophisticated applications which fully exploit Visual Foxpro's
advanced features. You will also learn how to work with back-end databases, and how to
approach the development of Internet-based applications.
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Pre-Requisites
To benefit from the course, you should have at
least six months experience of developing VFP applications. You
should also be familiar with the topics covered in our Stage 2
course, especially VFP's OOP features.
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Course Contents
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Developing client-server applications
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- Introduction to client-server concepts and terminology.
- Using ODBC to connect to back-end databases.
- Remote views vs. SQL pass-through.
- Design issues; optimizing data access.
- The development process: prototyping with local views.
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Extending VFP with the Windows API
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- Overview of API functions, calling sequences and data types.
- Using API calls to extend your application's functionality.
- Getting information about the Windows environment.
- Accessing and updating the Windows Registry.
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Integrating and communicating with other applications
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- Understanding ActiveX Automation, COM and DCOM.
- Using ActiveX Automation to integrate with Microsoft Office: the Office object model.
- Sharing documents with Word; using Word for spell-checking and mail-merge.
- Passing data to and from Excel; calling Excel's workbook functions.
- Working with registered document types; using ShellExecute().
- Working with Outlook folders.
- Exploiting the Windows Scripting Host.
- Calling VFP functions from other applications and languages.
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Exploiting ActiveX controls
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- Overview of available controls.
- How to acquire, deploy and register controls; dealing with common problems.
- Some examples of ActiveX controls: date-picker, tree-view, list-view.
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Internet-related features
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- Adding a browser to the application.
- Publishing VFP data as static web pages.
- Sending and receiving e-mail from within the application.
- Using the Internet Transfer Control for FTP and HTTP transfers.
- Developing web-based VFP applications with FOXISAPI.
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Going further with OOP
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- Planning, designing and building a sound class library; communicating between classes.
- Using polymorphism to simplify class design.
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User interface issues
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- Techniques for developing a sound, consistent and friendly user interface.
- Progress-reporting; interrupting the event loop.
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Microsoft Certification
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Between them, our Stage 2 and Stage 3 courses cover 80 percent of the
requirements for Exam 70-156 (Visual Foxpro Desktop) and 70 percent of
those for Exam 70-155 (Visual Foxpro Distributed). As a matter of
policy, we do no not use official Microsoft course material. All courses
are taught by a Microsoft Certified Professional, qualified in Visual Foxpro.
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