14 days ago
I recently picked up a Windows ARM 'Co-Pilot' capable laptop and took it for a spin running my typical spread of Windows applications and tools. I also checked out how well it works with FoxPro - here's what I found.
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1 month ago
Web Connection 8.1 is out. This is a small maintenance release, but it does include a few significant updates.
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1 month ago
Web Connection in the past has not supported > 16mb direct output via plain string based output, due to FoxPro's 16mb string limit. 16mb is a lot of text and while I generally don't recommend returning that much data as part of non-file request (which does support larger files) it's a feature request that comes up from time to time as people overrun the limit. During last weekend's SW Fox conference I heard about this issue again in a session and decided to address it once and for all and this posts describes the change and how it's implemented.
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1 month ago
In this very long white paper for the Southwest Fox conference, I discuss the basics of wwDotnetBridge and then demonstrate a variety of functionality with 10 examples. We'll see basic usage, how to wrap classes in FoxPro and .NET, how to use a variety of .NET 3rd party libraries, how to handle .NET events and how to make Task based async calls.
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4 months ago
Web Connection 8.0 is here and this is the official release post for this new version.
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5 months ago
West Wind Client Tools 8.0 has released as a major version rollup release. Here's all that's new and fixed.
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8 months ago
If you're using a .NET component with wwDotnetBridge or plain COM Interop that has a native dependency on non-.NET DLLs, you need to be careful to ensure that the native libraries can be found. In this post I describe how .NET assembly loading works and how external native dependencies are resolved in .NET and subsequently how you have to deal with them in your FoxPro applications.
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November 14, 2023
Web Connection 7.35 is out. This is a maintenance release but there are a handful of new features and improvements, with the key feature being a new REST Service Authentication scheme that integrates wwSession and wwUserSecurity for Bearer Token authentication.
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April 15, 2023
I work with a lot of different customers that use FoxPro to build applications, and it always amazes me when I see developers launching into their application by starting FoxPro and then explicitly navigating - via `CD` commands or even interactively - to the actual project folder for about a minute. In this post I describe why it's a good idea to build a consistent startup environment for your development setup and some of the ways you can accomplish that task.
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April 04, 2023
Web Connection 7.32 is out and it's a small maintenence update. In this post I go over some of the small feature updates and fixes and describe them in more detail.
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January 12, 2023
Sometimes it's necesasry to wait for an external operation to complete, and when using Web Connection you have to be careful to do the right thing to avoid running into problems with user interface operations that might fail in COM mode. In this post I talk about different types of wait operations that you can use safely and how you should really try hard to minimize wait operations in your applications.
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November 21, 2022
If you need to access FoxPro data from other application via the VFP OleDb driver, watch for problems with 64 bit applications, since they cannot use the 32 bit OleDb (or ODBC) driver.
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January 17, 2022
Web Connection 7.26 is out and in this post I'll go over some of the new features in a little more detail.
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October 20, 2021
REST API Services are no longer a novelty, but have become the standard way for organizations to publishing services for remote access. Whether it's public APIs both free and commercial, as well as SPA apps that use internal APIs for a backend, REST's simplicity and loose suggestions has won out of more complex service architectures of the past. In this article from Virtual FoxFest 2021 I talk about how you can access REST services from FoxPro and how to create REST services using FoxPro and Web Connection.
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August 18, 2021
One of the nice improvements in recent Web Connection projects is the new `launch` command which makes it drop dead easy to start your Web Connection applications by launching Web Server, FoxPro application and browser all in one quick step. If you have an older version of Web Connection, or need to updated an earlier version of `launch.prg` to the latest version, here are some tips on how you can easily create a new `launch.prg` specific for your existing application.
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June 28, 2021
Bootstrap 5 has been out for a while now and it was time to take it for a spin on the West Wind Message board application to see what's required to upgrade a Web Connection application to use Bootstrap 5. Here is review, some thoughts and some of my update notes.
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March 15, 2021
Web Connection 7.20 is here. This is a maintenance release but it also features a number of new and updated features including support for Web Sockets, consolidated Administration UI, a new `OnRouting()` handler and a bunch of updates to core components.
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November 08, 2020
In this post I'll describe the common workflow I use when I use wwDotnetBridge to check out the .NET code I'm trying to call first in .NET before actually starting to create the FoxPro code. This helps in discovering the features available on the libraries I'm trying to call, but it also validates that I'm using the .NET code directly before I start adding that extra layer of FoxPro abstraction on top of it.
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August 01, 2020
Web Connection 7.15 is here and it provides a few small enhancements as well as improved log format configuration, an updated Request Viewer that makes it easier to examine the last few requests, a few Cookie updates and a wwJsonSerializer bug fix.
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July 03, 2020
FoxPro's string speed is reasonably good for most operations. But one shortcoming is character by character parsing which can only be accomplished via the `SUBSTR()` command, which as it turns out is horribly slow when strings get large. In this post I describe the problem and offer a couple of solutions to get better character by character parsing speed for string iteration.
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June 04, 2020
FoxPro dates can be finicky when travelling over COM and COM Interop for .NET. Ran into a nasty issue with dates from cursors showing up as slightly rounded date values in .NET which lose some of the document definition. Here's what the problem is and how you can work around it in .NET.
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May 02, 2020
If you're passing FoxPro objects to COM objects and have .NET call back to you on objects that you passed makes it possible to effectively create asynchrnous applications where .NET code can process stuff in the background and notifying you when it's done or other needs to let you know that something changed. It's powerful but it brings its own set of problems in FoxPro, which wasn't design with Async code in mind. In this post I talk about some of the issue and some of the things you can do to avoid callback hell in FoxPro.
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April 30, 2020
Web Connection 7.12 is here and this post goes over some of the high level improvements in some detail
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March 08, 2020
Web Connection 7.10 is out and this is the official release post with a lot of detail over what's new and what's changed. This release brings a new self-contained Web Connection Web server and part of the post goes behind the rational of adding this new server to make it easier to get started with Web Connection.
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February 06, 2020
Posting my session notes article from the 2019 SWFox conference about getting started with VueJS and using it for enhancing Web pages with VueJs much in the way we used to do it with jQuery.
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December 05, 2019
Need to know how to publish a Web Connection application to a new Web Server? This article takes you end to end through all the steps from setting a new Virtual Machine Server, to installing the Web Server, configuring the machine and setting up your Web application. If you're coming from an older version of Web Connection pre-7.0 you'll find that the process is a lot more automated than it has been in the past.
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September 24, 2019
ComValue is a useful helper class in wwDotnetBridge that provides a wrapper around .NET Values that otherwise would not be accessible to FoxPro due to COM value incompatibilities. ComValues can be passed into .NET methods and are returned as result values for wwDotnetBridge's intrinsic indirect access methods. In this post I describe how ComValue works and why we need it in the first place.
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September 01, 2019
West Wind Web Connection 7.08 is here. This is a small maintenance release with a number of bug fixes and a few small feature enhancements.
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July 21, 2019
You can use FoxPro's SQL Server connectivity to connect to Microsoft's SQL Azure. This post describes a few things you have to do set up your application to work with Azure's SQL Server implementation which requires a little extra configuration work.
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May 23, 2019
Web Connection 7.06 release notes. This is a maintenance release with a couple of cool new development time feature enhancements for Live Reload and an updated Launcher.
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May 07, 2019
Web Connection 7.05 is here! This release is primarily a maintenance release that has a few small fixes and a few performance enhancements. But there are also a number of pretty cool new features that I'm pretty excited about. In this post I'll dig into some of the new features with more detail.
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May 04, 2019
Live Reload is usually a client side only feature that provides the ability to make changes to client side web code - HTML, CSS and JavaScript - and have those changes immediately reflected in the browser. Web Connection provides a Browser Sync based implementation, but until v7.05 server based changes still required manual refreshes. In this post I'll describe a new 7.05 and later feature that allows you to automatically restart your Web Connection server when a code change is made and - if combined with Browser Sync - also refreshes the currently active browser page.
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April 26, 2019
The FoxPro Declare API has been in FoxPro forever, but did you know that the actual step of calling DECLARE has significant performance overhead that often is much slower than the actual API calls? I recently ran into this checking out a third party library and decided to some closer examination and found some nice ways to speed up some of my existing API calls by separating (or static loading) declarations from invocations.
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January 24, 2019
Web Connection 7.02 is here and this post provides a detailed look at most of the new features included in this maintenance update.
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December 17, 2018
This post contains my session notes for the Southwest Fox 2018 session **Marking up the World with Markdown**. This article provides an overview of what Markdown is and why it is useful for generic writing tasks as well as for integration into FoxPro or Web applications. Markdown is immensely popular these days as a text entry format and in this post you learn how you can easily use it from your own FoxPro and more importantly why you might want to use it in the first place.
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December 10, 2018
Security is hard especially for Web applications and configuration. This post is the White Paper for my Southwest Fox session on Web Connection Security and covers a wide range of internals of how IIS and Web Connection interact and how to configure both system level and application level security for your FoxPro Web Connection applications.
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November 15, 2018
Web Connection 7.0 is and here is a detailed post that goes into some detail of many of the new and enhanced features in this new release
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October 09, 2018
Live reloading is common in client side applications, but server side applications generally don't have the ability to automatically reload when a server side change is made. But there are tools that allow you to monitor your local development Web server - even non-NodeJs based ones - and can automatically reload the active page when a change is detected. In this post I look at how to use Browser Sync to be more productive
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September 22, 2018
I'm happy to say that I've found a workaround for the nasty problem with wwDotnetBridge and not being able to load `wwdotnetbridge.dll` due to Windows file blocking for files or archives downloaded from the Internet. In this post i describe why files are blocked and how you can unblock them including a new solution that is fast and can be done from within a running application.
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August 15, 2018
If you run into problems with a Web Connection COM Server one of the first things you need to do is ensure that the server is properly registered and working on the Windows installation. In this post I look at using both Visual FoxPro and PowerShell to load and test to see whether a Web Connection server is installed and able to return a result.
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June 14, 2018
Web Connection 6.21 has been released. This is a small maintenance release that fixes a few small bugs and makes a few small performance tweaks. There are also a couple of new features: wwDotnetBridge Event handling for .NET Objects, new .NET Runtime Loader with better error reporting and a new Console Configuration task to fix the annoying Loopback Check that can prevent server local Windows account authentication.
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June 14, 2018
If you've ever run into a problem on a Windows Server and weren't able to run a local browser and try to log in using your local network Windows credentials you might have found out the long way that your credentials are not working by default. Recently Windows 10 also seems to have enabled this policy and I noticed local Windows account log ins not working. This comes from a local Loopback access policy. In this post I describe what fails and how you can work around it both for Web Connection applications and manually.
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June 08, 2018
One of the most common questions with Web Connection that come up are related to startup errors that cause File or COM Servers to fail during startup. These errors have been difficult to debug in the past but with Web Connection 6+ a number of improvements make it easier to avoid errors in the first place, and track them down if you do have them. In this post I go into detail on the Startup sequence of Web Connection.
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March 01, 2018
This week Authorize.NET switched of support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1, requiring all clients to use TLS 1.2. No surprise this was announced two years ago, but as is often the case two years is a long time away and so many were still caught off guard if you're running an oldish version of Windows. In this post I look at what versions of Windows don't support TLS 1.2 and how you can enable TLS 1.2 in those versions that didn't originally have support but can enable it. Unfortunately there are also several versions of Windows that don't support TLS 1.2 and we'll cover that too.
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February 05, 2018
The West Wind Web Connection Admin page is the starting point for Web Connection Server Instance administration. But this page allows a number of administrative operations that should only be accessible by a properly authenticated user. I've been notified on many occasions that people have found wide open Admin pages and this post describes how to make sure your Admin pages are properly locked down
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January 10, 2018
West Wind Web Connection 6.18 has been released. It's a small release with only one major feature update in the way of bringing back Apache support for Apache 2.4. Here's more info what's new.
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January 05, 2018
There are a number of issues related to shutting down specific instances of Web Connection servers remotely. Because of the way instances are managed there are difference between file and COM mode operation because file mode instances are not managed by a centralized manager. However with a few tricks you can trigger shutdown operations in a Web Connection server by hooking into Windows Events with BINDEVENT(). Here's how.
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October 15, 2017
West Wind Web Connection 6.17 has been released. This post goes over the changes in more detail. This is a maintenance release with a few bug fixes and some minor feature updates.
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October 10, 2017
More and more .NET APIs expose Async only interfaces and it might seem that calling `async` `await` code from FoxPro seems like it would be difficult. I had my doubts it would but as it turns out it does. In this post I describe how `async` `await` works in .NET and how the lower Task API is used to implement it, and more importantly how we can call async methods using the .NET Task API.
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July 15, 2017
Web Connection 6.15 has been released and this post gives a lot more details on the new features of this update. This release is primarily focused on server loading and debugging improvements with a few relatively small but significant enhancements that improve load performance and make it easier to debug startup errors.
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