Sylvester Alelele - Articles

 

Sylvester Alelele is a Senior Systems Analyst/Programmer and Group Head of Operations for Forest-Elephant Technology & Procurement Group Plc. He lives and works in Addis Ababa Ethiopia. He develops applications with Microsoft Visual FoxPro, Visual Basic and the .Net Framework, Oracle, Advantage Database Server and Ms SQL Server. He has over sixteen (16) years of experience building enterprise database solutions of all sizes

Populating Visual FoxPro Reports with data on the Fly

If you are using Visual FoxPro's Report Writer as your reporting environment, how can you generate report data and populate your report at run time? This article explains how to generate or compile data at report run time to be used by your report. This data may not exist or may exist in a form that cannot be readily used in the report! Read

By: Sylvester Alelele | 27/08/2009 | Programming

When it is crunch time: Migrating from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Basic .Net/2005

As a Visual Basic 6.0 programmer, what is the roadmap forward for your applications? As Visual Basic 6.0 becomes ‘deprecated technology’ what will you do with your enterprise class applications written in Visual Basic 6.0. This article is the musings of a developer that has been looking at migrating existing enterprise-class Visual Basic 6.0 applications to Visual Basic 2005. Read

By: Sylvester Alelele | 27/08/2009 | Programming

Building Data Aware Classes in Visual FoxPro Part 2: Using Data Transports and Temporary Storage

In the last article (Part 1), we discussed how to encapsulate data access code and business rules in Visual FoxPro by using classes contained in Visual Class Libraries (.vcx) files. If Data Access and Validate code is encapsulated in classes, how can data be returned to a form and how can data-bound forms be built? This artcliel seeks to demonstrate that you can build effective database applications even though your data access code is encapsulated in Data-Aware Classes Read

By: Sylvester Alelele | 16/07/2009 | Programming

Building and Using Data Aware Classes in Visual FoxPro Applications Part 1: Utilizing Visual Class Libraries for Data Access and Business Rules

Visual Class Libraries allow you to build powerful Visual FoxPro applications and to implement powerful Object Oriented features. Because you can create your own class libraries, you will have an additional place to put code that accesses your application database by building data aware classes (classes that can ‘talk’ to your database and either return queried information, save new information or perform updates and deletes as necessary). This article explores use of Data Aware Classes. Read

By: Sylvester Alelele | 23/06/2009 | Programming

Giving Visual FoxPro a new lease life

I read an article on the Internet about what can be done by both Microsoft Corporation and Visual FoxPro programmers to give Visual FoxPro a new lease of life! For example, that article suggested doing away with the Fox icon at the top of the Visual FoxPro application window, reengineering parts of the FoxPro application including doing away with the Windows 95 dialog boxes and so on. This article seeks to contribute to that debate, suggesting additional ideas making VFP product more markatable! Read

By: Sylvester Alelele | 21/05/2009 | Databases

Visual FoxPro is still here, still very relevant

An artime on SD Times Paraises FoxPro's Contributions to technology and then Asks 'Where have you gone Visual FoxPro?' In this article,we want to share some of the great things Visual FoxPro is doing in our part of the world and how VFP provides a robust database environment for architecting affordable enterprise class applications for fast growing companies. This article discusses why Visual FoxPro continues to be a compelling tool in applications development and why FoxPro will remain relevant Read

By: Sylvester Alelele | 22/04/2009 | Databases