Marcia Akins
  Marcia is an independent Consultant and software developer who for the past few years has worked primarily with Visual FoxPro and SQL Server. She and her husband, Andy Kramek own and operate Tightline Computers, Inc. from their home in Akron, Ohio. She has been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional since 1999 and also has Microsoft Certified Professional qualifications for both Distributed and Desktop Applications in Visual FoxPro.

Marcia has co-authored the Kitbox column in FoxTalk Magazine since November, 2001. Her published work also includes several articles for both FoxPro Advisor and FoxTalk magazines as well as the very successful book "1001 Things You Wanted to Know About VFP" (Hentzenwerke publishing, 2000) and “MegaFox: 1002 Things You Wanted to Know About Extending VFP” (Hentzenwerke publishing, 2002).

Speaking engagements include Southwest Fox (Phoenix October 2004,2005), OzFox (Sydney, Australia, July 2003), Visual FoxPro Devcon (Prague, Czech Republic, June 2002 and 2005), Essential Fox (Kansas City, 2002, 2003, 2004), Conference to the Max (Holland, 2000, 2002), Great Lakes Great Database Workshop (Milwaukee, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003), Advisor Devcon (2001, 2002), German Devcon (Frankfurt, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005), as well as user group meetings in Europe and the U.S.

You can reach Marcia at marcia@tightlinecomputers.com
 
   
  Using Microsoft ActiveX Controls in VFP
ActiveX controls have been around for quite a while now, and are quite widely used by developers working in other languages. However, they have never been really popular among FoxPro developers. This is a shame because there are some very good ActiveX controls available, completely free, that provide useful functionality with little or no effort. In this session, Marcia shows you how you can leverage some of these standard controls to extend your Visual FoxPro applications.

Attendees will learn how to:
1. Use the Microsoft TreeView Control
2. Use the Microsoft ListView Control
3. Use the Microsoft Toolbar Control
4. Use the Microsoft Status Bar Control
5. Synchronize TreeeView and ListView Control for an explorer-type interface

Skill level: Intermediate
Suggested prerequisites: with class and form designers
   
 

Pre-Conference Session

Putting Microsoft Office To Work For You
Gone are the days when we can develop an application using Visual FoxPro alone. Users today are much more sophisticated and expect to be able to use their favorite tools from within the application when it is appropriate. For example, an order entry system may need to generate and print quotes to send to potential customers. Word Automation is the perfect tool for accomplishing this task.

It is also important to use the best tool for the job. While Visual FoxPro is great for doing string manipulation and munging data, it does not have the power of Excel for performing complex calculations. We can use a combination of Excel automation and event binding (using the EVENTHANDLER() function ) to perform the calculations and store the intermediate results in our database.

More and more applications are exposing more of their functionality through components which can be automated. Examples include MapPoint, Visio and even non-Microsoft products like QuickBooks and Lotus Notes. The same basic techniques can be used to put any of these tools to work in your application.

However, putting Office to work does not involve automation only. An application may need to process e-mail. Since the introduction of the "Draconian Security Patch from H*ll", Outlook Automation is almost more trouble than it is worth. One alternative is to use the Outlook ActiveX control.

This workshop takes an in-depth look at generating word documents from templates with bookmarks, performing complex calculations using Excel, automating Visio and using the Outlook ActiveX control. Along the way, Marcia will demonstrate some key techniques for investigating the capabilities of automation servers and also for data-driving processes so that the code is more flexible and more re-usable.

Attendees will learn how to...
1. Use the Object Browser, IntelliSense and VBA macros to discover how to use an automation server
2. Automate Word to generate a document using a template with bookmarks
3. Automate Excel to perform complex calculations and save results to a table
4. Automate Visio to create a flowchart
5. Use the Outlook ActiveX control
6. Write VFP handler objects to run VFP code when an event fires on the automation server

Skill Level/Prerequisites
Skill level: Intermediate
Suggested prerequisites: Familiarity with class and form designers