Visual FoxPro Reference | Hackers Guide to Visual FoxPro 7.0

Acknowledgments for the Second Edition

As with the original Hacker's Guide, lots of people have made this book better. We'll start right off the bat by thanking all the people we thanked the first time around. (See the acknowledgments for the first edition for their names.) It was a lot easier (though not as much as we'd hoped) to write this book when we started with 800 solid pages.

Our technical editor for this edition, Doug Hennig, improved the book in many ways. He caught us when we were sloppy or lazy, shared his extensive knowledge with us, and even fixed many of our grammatical mistakes (though we're still not sure we agree with him about when you need "that" and when you don't). Jeana Frazier, our copy editor, was all that we could ask and more. She managed to improve our writing without changing the meaning, and was flexible about style issues without letting us run wild.

Steven Black again contributed his expertise, updating his original masterful work on the Builders and Wizards, and letting his zest for the Class Browser and Component Gallery produce an in-depth guide to these complex tools.

A number of people let us know about mistakes and misprints in both the original Hacker's Guide and early versions of this one. Thanks to Steven Black, Dan Freeman, Chaim Caron, Doug Hennig, Paul Maskens, Hale Pringle, Andrew Ross MacNeill, Tom Piper, Hans Remiens, Brad Schulz, Edwin Weston and Gene Wirchenko. If we left your name out of this list, it doesn't mean that your contribution didn't count, only that you've caught us in another mistake.

Similarly, a lot of people pointed out VFP problems with words like "you might want to include this in the Hacker's Guide." We can't possibly list all of those people here, but your contributions are appreciated and they all make this a better book.

A few people offered us so much wisdom that we must include their names (or they'll come after us). Thanks, in no particular order, to Christof Lange, Mac Rubel, Drew Speedie (technical editor for the first edition), Jim Booth, Gary DeWitt, Steve Dingle, Dan Freeman, and everyone else who taught us something, made a point clear, or asked a hard question that made us rethink an issue.

Thanks to the contributors of material for the disk: Sue Cunningham, the Wyoming Silver Fox, Toni Feltman, Jim Hollingsworth, Ryan Katri, Ken Levy, Andrew Ross MacNeill, Guy Pardoe, the late Tom Rettig, and Randy Wallin.

The folks at Microsoft have been remarkably helpful and kind to a couple of people who make a habit of pointing out what's wrong with their product. Special thanks to Susan Graham (now formerly of Microsoft), Calvin Hsia, Robert Green, Randy Brown, John Rivard, Allison Koeneke, and the hard-working beta team: Phil Stitt, Jim Saunders, Hong-Chee Tan, Steve Pepitone, Dave Kappl and Steve Klem for putting up with our incessant questions and the whole VFP team (including some people who don't actually work for Microsoft) for giving us this great toy to pound on. Similarly, the DevCon '98 speakers helped to plug a few holes in our knowledge and give us some ideas about what you could do with this version of VFP.

Thanks, too, to the other teams at Microsoft responsible for the tools we used to build this book. The Word team produced Service Release 2 just in time to fix some of the most horrific bugs with generating HTML from Word. Despite our many grumblings about its shortcomings, Word is one of the world's most powerful word processors, and its capability to do Automation made assembly of the book and the HTML Help file a far easier process. Thanks, too, to Word MVP's and/or CSP's Cindy Meister, Colleen Macri, George Mair and Chris Woodman, for their help in figuring out how to get Word to do what we wanted rather than what it wanted.

Many people encouraged the creation of some sort of hypertext documentation. HTML Help came along just at just the right time to be used for this version of the book. The HTML Help team has done an incredible job with a product whose specs won't sit still, treating us to versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.1a and 1.1b in less than a year. Thanks to Dan Freeman and Steven Black for their insistence on its value, Stephen Le Hunte for his incredible HTML Reference Library, and to the wonderful folks on the WINHLP-L mailing list for explaining it all, especially Help MVPs Cheryl Lockett Zubak and Dana Cline, and list contributor Patrick Sheahan for his hack to make the Fonts button appear.

As always, the VFP beta testers taught us a lot, showed us all kinds of strange behaviors, and made the whole process a lot more fun. Thanks, too, to all of the readers of our first version, for the encouraging words and support.

We're not sure what to say to our good friend, Whil Hentzen, who's been crazy enough to take on publishing books as a sideline to his software development business. Guess "thanks for everything, Whil" will have to do. Special thanks, also, to Whil's wife, Linda, who holds it all together and fits right in with the crowd.

Finally, once again, we have to thank the two people who got us into this in the first place, Woody Leonhard and Arnold Bilansky. Perhaps thanks are also due to an anonymous cab driver in Toronto who let us do all the talking the day we met so we could discover we were friends.

On a personal level, life doesn't stop while you spend nearly a year writing a book and we each owe a lot to the people around us.

Once again, my family has had too little of me for too long. I owe my husband, Marshal, and sons, Solomon and Nathaniel, more than I can possibly explain for their love, patience (especially while I talked about things they knew nothing about), and help.

As before, my extended family and good friends have been supportive and helpful throughout, as have the people at Advisor.

Tamar

Through the year of turning this crazy idea into the book before you, life went on. Thanks to Ellen, my dear wife, for putting up with it all. You are my strength and my inspiration. Thanks, Steve, for entertaining yourself for nearly a year. Thanks and farewell to my best beta tester, Chloe. Thanks to my coworkers at Blackstone for their suggestions, support and encouragement.

Ted

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