Foxpro 2.5a Running on J&L ChatterBox

[kelunaboy]

Hello group - three weeks ago I hired on with a local government agency which has a revenue acct sys running on a Novell 4.2 server to which a nine node Chatterbox is attached. The Chatterbox nodes are Pentium 233 computers on a board running Win95. Remote access is via frame relay and dial-up on a private fractional T-1. Things are working now, but just barely. The application and database files have been running without any real maintainence since mid-1998. The previous programmer never touched the Foxpro code or tables, he linked to them with Access and ran his "fixes" externally.

My question is how difficult would a port to VFP 7.0 be? Is 7.0 much different from 5.0? Several years ago I helped with a FPW2.6a port to VFP 5.0, which worked out quite well. But for the past 3 years I have been doing QA work with Java and TCL applications, and have been out of the VFP loop.

Also anyone here know where support for the J&L Chatterbox products can be found?

Thanks in advance - I think this project will keep me coming to this forum just about every day!

 

[rgbean]

While there have been a number of changes to the development environment, along with more "native" functions in VFP 7.0 vs. 5.0, you shouldn't have any trouble adjusting. The conversion / rewrite should be about the same difficulty, unless this app is FP DOS, which just adds one more level of complexity. VFP 6.0 tightened up on date handling (remember Y2K?), and VFP 7.0 tightened up on some more syntax - mostly due intellisense and better COM handling.

Lots of luck, and you'll probably want to post most of the rest of your questions on the VFP 3.0 and higher forum.

Rick