Tag / visual foxpro in windows vista

by Kevin Ragsdale

Vista, Aero, and Fixed-Border Forms in VFP

I was working on my first VFP 9 app using Vista this week, and I had some forms that just refused to appear correctly. Specifically, the form’s Title Bar and Border would just disappear.

Looks like I’m not alone in this, as Rick Strahl wrote on his blog.

This seemed to only happen with Aero turned on, and with ‘fixed’ BorderStyle’s on my forms.

My workaround was to make the form BorderStyle=3 (Sizable), and set the MaxHeight, MinHeight, MaxWidth and MinWidth properties to the form’s Height and Width.

Problem solved!

Except for one thing. Now the user will see the ‘resize’ cursor when they hover over a border. They can try all they want to resize, but they can’t (thanks to the Max and Min settings).

I tried leaving the BorderStyle as 2, then adding code to my form’s INIT() to check the OS version and change the properties on-the-fly, but it was a no-go, so until VFP9SP2 I’m going to stick with this method for now.

This post originally appeared on the Foxite Weblogs site.

by Kevin Ragsdale

Craig Boyd’s Compression FLL vs. Windows Vista

I’ve been running Windows Vista Business this week.  A bit sluggish on my machine versus Windows XP, but overall I haven’t had any major issues with it.

Until today.

Today I downloaded a zipped file from the internet. It was 4.1 MB (zipped) and 10.4 MB after extraction.

What killed me was the Extraction Wizard.

The file was downloaded to my ‘personal download’ folder (on my machine, C:UsersKevin RagsdaleDownloads), and when I selected ‘Extract All’ from the pseudo-menu in Explorer, I saw the following screen:

 

Twenty-nine minutes to extract a 10MB file? Oh yeah, that’s how I like spending my afternoons…

Oh well, at least it has the flashy animation in the top right of the form, and (for lack of a better word) the throbbing progress bar. What the heck is it with the progress bar anyway?

After hitting cancel about 80 times, I was finally able to stop the extraction.

Then I thought, “Hmmm, I wonder how long Craig Boyd’s FLL would take?”

Here’s the answer:

 

Now that’s more like it.

To be fair, I should say that Windows was extracting the file to my ‘personal downloads’ folder, while Craig’s FLL was extracting the file to a different partition.

So, I decided to run Craig’s FLL again, this time extracting to the ‘personal downloads’ folder:

 

Freaky, huh? Took almost three times longer. I reckon Vista is doing some of that super-dee-dooper-dee-vista-is-so-secure security stuff. Maybe that is what slowed it down. Dunno.

Maybe it’s my machine. Maybe it’s my install. Maybe I’m just imagining things.

But, still, twenty-six seconds versus twenty-nine minutes?

Craig wins…

Anyone else seeing weird behavior like this in Vista?

This post originally appeared on the Foxite Weblogs site.