State of Art 2003-2004

State of the art is a rapidly moving target because software developers and hardware engineers around the globe are working on advancing technology at a rapid pace. This moving target makes it difficult for authors to write about technology and get these writings in a book without looking like they are a step behind. It is inevitable that what we have written about in 2003 and early 2004 will be a step behind what is released in 2004 and beyond. Still, concepts and ideas presented in this book will be around forever, like communicating with your customers after a release and planning and researching technology you will be deploying. Other techniques will stick around because developers do not always upgrade to the latest developer tools or remain on a platform because of other constraints. That said, we want to provide some perspective on the technology we are using when we wrote this book.

For the most part when we mention Visual FoxPro, we are referring to the latest version, which is Visual FoxPro 8, Service Pack 1. The Visual FoxPro 9 public beta is expected soon after the printing. We also realize developers have reasons to support applications in previous versions so we included information as far back as Visual FoxPro 6 in some cases and even some short discussions on FoxPro 2.x for DOS and Windows.

InstallShield Express is often discussed in this book because it is an excellent tool and a limited edition is included with Visual FoxPro so it is commonly used by Visual FoxPro developers. During the time this book was written, InstallShield (the company) released two major releases (one in April 2003, the other in November 2003). We did our best to cover the version that ships with Visual FoxPro, as well as the major releases of the full product.

We also cover the other setup tools we have used in the ‚“How To ‚½ appendixes. Wise for Windows Installer is at version 5.2, InstaFox is at version 2.0, and Inno Setup is at version 4.0. Windows Installer from Microsoft is currently at version 2.0. Microsoft is working on version 3.0, but it is not released and we are not covering this version.

Some developers might be disappointed that there is not a chapter in this book on the Setup Wizard. Microsoft dumped the Setup Wizard when they shipped Visual FoxPro 7, which is already several years old and by the end of 2004, already two versions behind the current version of Visual FoxPro. If you are looking for tips and tricks for the Setup Wizard, we recommend getting a copy of Hentzenwerke ‚ s MegaFox: 1002 Things You Wanted To

Know About Extending Visual FoxPro . This book has 13 pages in Chapter 11, ‚“Deployment, ‚½ dedicated to tips and tricks.