Free Utilities from West Wind Technologies

The following utilities are programs that have been made available freely by Rick Strahl and West Wind Technologies. Several of these utilities have previously appeared in articles of FoxPro related magazines, while others have quietly been made available only online.

Visual FoxPro Utilities

West Wind MultiMedia (MCI)

A set of classes that provide a front end interface to Windows MultiMedia Control Interface

The set of wwMCI classes for accessing the Windows MCI control interface allows your applications to exert fine control over multimedia related operations. The class library abstracts the MCI interface into easy to use class methods. Seperate classes are provided for WaveAudio (playing and recording), AVI Video, and Audio CD playing. The MCI base class provides the core functionality that will allow adding new MCI devices easily by creating a new subclass for new devices.
The Video class allows you to run AVI video files inside of a Visual FoxPro window with the ability to move and resize the window and the video image contained within it.
A viewer class that supports video and wave file playback via user interface and program control is also supplied to demonstrate the MCI class functionality
This class is still preliminary and not very well documented (the only documentation at this point are the class method headers). The main example of how it works is the MCIVideo form example. While the functionality provided works well at this point, the spec for this class is still changing. I'm providing this class now, because so many people have requested it after my initial posts of pieces of this class.

Download wwMCI.zip (01/25/96 - 45k)

Enhanced 3D Effects for VFP 3.0

Supplemental 3D Effects for Visual FoxPro objects

The 3DCtl class library is a collection of classes that provide enhanced 3D effects in addition to those provided natively by Visual FoxPro. While Visual FoxPro's 3D effects look nice and follow the standard, some of the effects we've become used with the GENSCRNX 3D driver aren't available. This class library provides shadowed labels, bevelled 3D boxes (both raised and lowered) and shadowed text and edit boxes and square shapes. The class is very easy to use, attaching to standard Visual FoxPro objects with standard property and method naming conventions.

Note: This class does not work properly under VFP 5.0!

Download ww3d.zip. (10/17/95 - 15k)

West Wind Thermometer

An easy to use progress bar/thermometer class for Visual FoxPro 3.0
The wwTherm class provides a couple of easy to use classes to provide feedback to users while lengthy tasks are taking place. The wwTherm class provides a visually pleasing, thermometer style percentage bar that is very easily used within your applications. A flexible interface make it a snap to set the percentage and update the caption from within loops and other time consuming operations. Several options are available for controlling how the thermometer is displayed including an auto-updating mode that allows the thermometer to update itself in the background (although this handy feature only works in interactive mode).
The wwWorkBox class is a simple and attractive box display that can display status messages while a long process that can not easily be covered with a percentage bar progress display. It gives a prominent display telling the user that something is going on, while a lengthy operation like indexing a table or running a complex query is in progress.

Download wwTherm.zip. (11/10/95 - 20k)

Registry Class

Read and write registry keys and trees

The system registry in Windows 95 and Windows NT is the preferred medium to store system and application configuration. The registry is accessed via a set of somewhat cryptic registry API functions contained in the Windows API. This Registry class provides abstracted, simple, compound methods for reading and writing registry keys via one step method calls.

• Read Registry Strings, Integers and Binary Values
• Write Strings and Integers
• Delete values and keys
• Retrieve keys of a specific hive into an array
• Retrieve value keys and values of a key into an array

The documentation is limited to the method headers contained in Registry.prg file. Examples are provided inside the PRG file.

Download Registry.zip (02/07/97 - 5k)

More stuff coming soon...

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Updated on 03/07/96