What's new in the Visual FoxPro Community

The next meeting of the Philadelphia Visual FoxPro User Group will be next Tuesday, January 12 at 7:00 PM in room 125, Devry University, 1140 Virginia Drive, Fort Washington, PA. Feel free to come as early as 6:30 and bring some dinner. This month's speaker is member Jim Connolly who?ll discuss West-Wind Web Connection 6.0 Beta. From the West Wind web site, here?s the description of the product: Create Web applications with Visual FoxPro and take advantage of a powerful and proven framework using the FoxPro environment you already know. Develop and test your code inside of the VFP IDE against live Web requests. Web Connection provides a core foundation engine, and several high level frameworks for developing just about any kind of Web application you can imagine. Create server driven HTML with our ASP.NET like Web Control Framework, or chose a more MVC like Templating approach. Build rich JavaScript apps and use REST services to feed data. Build raw POX or SOAP backend or use no framework at all and create your own low level engine on top of the core. If you need Web for FoxPro - Web Connection can do it all. Jim will show the new features and give examples of setting it up on a computer.

We're happy to announce beta 4 of West Wind Html Help Builder. Help Builder is a tool to create documentation for all kinds of scenarios including application or developer documentation, FAQs, snippet repositories, knowledge bases, Help Desk references. Using Help Builder's low friction interface to create content you can generate HTML Web site output, CHM files or export to Word or PDF. It uses all Web based technologies for styling, templating and customization, and lets you focus on creating your content not worrying about markup. Using 5.0's new editor and support for the Markdown text format content writing becomes distraction free. 5.0 also introduces new mobile friendly templates that make content more accessible, fast to navigate and SEO friendly. For developers, Help Builder allows creating class and database documentation from source files including .NET types, SQL Server database, FoxPro code, Web Services definitions and data and COM objects. Mix and match imported documentation with your custom documentation content. Documentation doesn't have to be a chore - let Help Builder help!

Help us plan for Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2016. Comment on recommended topics and add your own on our conference blog. http://swfox.net/blog/2015/12/what-do-you-want-to-learn-in-2016/

The next meeting of the Philadelphia VFP User Group will be next Tuesday, December 8 at 7:00 PM in room 125, Devry University, 1140 Virginia Drive, Fort Washington, PA. Feel free to come as early as 6:30 and bring some dinner. Our speaker this month will again be Toni Feltman. She?ll present ?An introduction to SQL Server Reporting Services (Part 2)? Abstract: Last month we looked at the basics of SSRS. This month we will pick up where we left off and: ? See how to accomplish some more complicated reporting tasks. ? Ways to render SSRS Reports in Visual FoxPro ? A way to "centralize" reporting services to be used by more than one type of client ? Differences between SSRS "express" and paid versions

West Wind Technologies has released beta 3 for version 6.0 of their flagship Web development tool West Wind Web Connection. Web Connection is a Web development framework for Visual FoxPro that allows you to use your FoxPro skills to build Web applications, services and APIs. Version 6.0 is a major update that provides many improvements to the development process. A new project system facilitates setting up, moving and deploying of projects. Automated configuration scripts make deployment much easier. Layout Pages, Partials and Sections allow for more modular MVC style HTML applications. There's new support for extensionless URLs, easier Authentication support, a Markdown parser and many new HtmlHelpers. Beta 3 is a stable release and can be installed side by side with existing Web Connection installations.

West Wind Technologies has released an updated beta of West Wind Html Help Builder 5.0. Help Builder is a documentation solution that makes it easy to create any kind of documentation for applications, FAQs, references and more. You can generate CHM Help files, MS Word and PDF files as well as HTML based online documentation you can easily publish to the Web. Version 5.0 is a major update that introduces a brand new text editor and a much richer editing experience as well as-you-type spell checking. Help Builder also adds the popular Markdown format for quicker text input and the ability to share text more easily. There are also new, cleaner and simpler templates for output creation and an overall overhaul of the user interface. Help Builder is available as shareware, and registered users can upgrade to the new version.