Chapter 10: Security

Overview

Security breaches in your favorite operating systems get big-time publicity in the world news. The topic is so important Bill Gates has taken on the task of making Windows more secure with the Trustworthy Computing initiative inside of Microsoft, and the Open Source community releases security patches on a regular basis. How secure are your Visual FoxPro solutions? This chapter briefly discusses some of the application and data security issues, and focuses primarily on addressing the security of your source code inside the executables you deploy.

How secure are Visual FoxPro applications? What about data stored in Visual FoxPro tables? It depends on how much effort you put into security and the choices you make in the design and implementation of the data store. What about the source code stored in the executable? Is your intellectual property at risk and does it matter? Again, it depends. If you are an employee working as part of an internal information technology team that writes custom applications corporate employees use it might not matter. If you write a vertical market application with an executable distributed all over the world you might worry about unethical developers hacking your distributions and stealing your intellectual property.

On The Web ‚  

Christof Lange, a Visual FoxPro guru and Microsoft MVP, has written an extensive whitepaper on the subject of Visual FoxPro security. This must read whitepaper can be found on his Web site:
http://www.foxpert.com/docs/security.en.htm