Craig Bailey's ScreenCasts Teach Key FoxPro Features

Craig's done a great job creating several screen casts that cover a wide variety of topics in VFP including data binding, using IntelliSense and how to access SQL server.

The best part? They're available in both SWF (Flash) and WMV (Windows Media).
CraigBailey.net

What is OOP?

If you're just getting started into Visual FoxPro, the term OOP may seem a bit foreign to you. It means Object-Oriented Programming, as opposed to Object-BASED programming.

Many languages may be object-based without being object-oriented (Visual Basic 6 and earlier were object-based, but not object-oriented).

Rahul Desai has a series of articles starting on CIOL to help make OOP easier to understand.

Learning Visual FoxPro: Coding Tips and Techniques

In Visual FoxPro, there are lots of different ways to accomplish the same things. This topic refers back to articles that cover how to improve code, yours or someone else's.


Andy Kramek's Writing Better Code Series
Part 1 - Treating users with respect but without affecting performance
Part 2 - Named Expressions or Macro Substitutions?
Part 3 - Procedures and Functions

Select() vs. ALIAS() - Using Work Areas (Andrew MacNeill)

Learning FoxPro: Articles

Although many developers like to watch videos or screencasts on FoxPro, there are a great many articles that are published online that can provide insight into FoxPro.

Understanding Buffering (Andy Kramek)
Buffering: TableUpdate and TableRevert (Andy Kramek)

Scope: Public, Private and Local variables (Andy Kramek - 2005)
Scope: Public, Protected and Hidden properties (Andy Kramek - 2005)

Building Queries in Visual FoxPro (Tamar Granor - 2002)
Using the FoxPro Debugger (Tamar Granor - 2002)
Introducing the VFP Debugger (Colin Nichols - 1999)
Using Drag and Drop in Visual FoxPro (Andrew MacNeill - 2001)

Approaches to Visual FoxPro Development

Just as artists approach a canvas with different styles, developers build applications in different ways and the same applies to Visual FoxPro. This post serves as a link to videos or discussions on topics about different approaches to developing VFP components.

Test-Driven Development in Visual FoxPro with Burt Rosen (a FoxCast)

FoxCast: Screencasts on Form/Class design, Debugging, and Reporting

Although it's also used for product Seminars, the group at Vision Pace also hosted a few webinars on general FoxPro topics with leading developers with their FoxCast site. Yes, you have to register but the downloads are free.

VFP 9 Form/Class Designer Enhancements with Drew Speedie

Debugging Essentials with Rick Schummer

Enhancements in the Reporting System with Doug Hennig

Extending the VFP 9 Reporting System with Doug Hennig

Getting the most out of Intellisense with Andy Kramek

Learning Visual FoxPro : Video Series

Craig Boyd of Sweet Potato Software is in the process of coming up with a series of online and downloadable videos on Visual FoxPro.

101 - Building a FoxPro Project

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Source Code

102 - Scope - Understanding how scope affects the lifetime of variables, arrays, parameters, constants, procedures, and object members.

103 - ??

104 - Error Handling - From ON ERROR to Exception-based error handling and COM Error Handling.

What is Visual FoxPro?

According to the Wikipedia, Visual FoxPro is a "data-centric object-oriented and procedural programming language produced by Microsoft."

But if you read the main Microsoft web site, Visual FoxPro "provides the tools you need to create and manage high-performance, 32-bit database applications and components."

A far better description, although lengthy, is also provided at the FoxWiki where it states that VFP "is a programming package sold by Microsoft. It contains a programming language, a database engine and an integrated development environment (IDE). An IDE allows programmers to do most of their work inside a single program. VFP has an excellent record of backwards compatibility so code that was written years ago can still be maintained and improved with a minimum of extra work. VFP is also a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool which means that its design is focused on software built quickly."

In short, Visual FoxPro is a combination of a lot of things: it has its own database engine, its own programming language, its own development environment and its own runtime - everything a developer needs to build an application without needing to rely on anything else.

Except, of course, that in modern terms, you likely do need to work with other environments, which Visual FoxPro is fairly good at as well. The bullet points post on the Wiki gives some other good information about FoxPro and why developers should and do choose FoxPro.

How do you learn about Visual FoxPro?

Welcome to the learning Visual FoxPro site.

This site is intended to be a learning link location. It will link to as much content as possible, categorizing it into sections to hopefully make it easier to learn.

Its intention is not to promote third party products (those you can find pretty much everywhere) but rather as much built-in knowledge about FoxPro, the best desktop database tool around.

If you are an author and feel I shouldn't be linking to your work here, please drop me a link and I will remove it.