wwDotnetBridge lets you interface with .NET code directly, but if need to access more than a handful of lines of .NET code from FoxPro, it's a good idea to create a separate dedicated .NET component and call that instead. There are many benefits to easier and more discoverable access to functionality, better performance and support for a few features that don't work well through wwDotnetBridge. In this post I show how to create a .NET component, build and run it, and how debug it as well.
I recently picked up a Windows ARM 'Co-Pilot' capable laptop and took it for a spin running my typical spread of Windows applications and tools. I also checked out how well it works with FoxPro - here's what I found.
Web Connection 8.1 is out. This is a small maintenance release, but it does include a few significant updates.
Web Connection in the past has not supported > 16mb direct output via plain string based output, due to FoxPro's 16mb string limit. 16mb is a lot of text and while I generally don't recommend returning that much data as part of non-file request (which does support larger files) it's a feature request that comes up from time to time as people overrun the limit. During last weekend's SW Fox conference I heard about this issue again in a session and decided to address it once and for all and this posts describes the change and how it's implemented.
In this very long white paper for the Southwest Fox conference, I discuss the basics of wwDotnetBridge and then demonstrate a variety of functionality with 10 examples. We'll see basic usage, how to wrap classes in FoxPro and .NET, how to use a variety of .NET 3rd party libraries, how to handle .NET events and how to make Task based async calls.
Web Connection 8.0 is here and this is the official release post for this new version.
West Wind Client Tools 8.0 has released as a major version rollup release. Here's all that's new and fixed.
If you're using a .NET component with wwDotnetBridge or plain COM Interop that has a native dependency on non-.NET DLLs, you need to be careful to ensure that the native libraries can be found. In this post I describe how .NET assembly loading works and how external native dependencies are resolved in .NET and subsequently how you have to deal with them in your FoxPro applications.
Web Connection 7.35 is out. This is a maintenance release but there are a handful of new features and improvements, with the key feature being a new REST Service Authentication scheme that integrates wwSession and wwUserSecurity for Bearer Token authentication.
I work with a lot of different customers that use FoxPro to build applications, and it always amazes me when I see developers launching into their application by starting FoxPro and then explicitly navigating - via `CD` commands or even interactively - to the actual project folder for about a minute. In this post I describe why it's a good idea to build a consistent startup environment for your development setup and some of the ways you can accomplish that task.
Web Connection 7.32 is out and it's a small maintenence update. In this post I go over some of the small feature updates and fixes and describe them in more detail.
Sometimes it's necesasry to wait for an external operation to complete, and when using Web Connection you have to be careful to do the right thing to avoid running into problems with user interface operations that might fail in COM mode. In this post I talk about different types of wait operations that you can use safely and how you should really try hard to minimize wait operations in your applications.
If you need to access FoxPro data from other application via the VFP OleDb driver, watch for problems with 64 bit applications, since they cannot use the 32 bit OleDb (or ODBC) driver.
Web Connection 7.26 is out and in this post I'll go over some of the new features in a little more detail.
REST API Services are no longer a novelty, but have become the standard way for organizations to publishing services for remote access. Whether it's public APIs both free and commercial, as well as SPA apps that use internal APIs for a backend, REST's simplicity and loose suggestions has won out of more complex service architectures of the past. In this article from Virtual FoxFest 2021 I talk about how you can access REST services from FoxPro and how to create REST services using FoxPro and Web Connection.
One of the nice improvements in recent Web Connection projects is the new `launch` command which makes it drop dead easy to start your Web Connection applications by launching Web Server, FoxPro application and browser all in one quick step. If you have an older version of Web Connection, or need to updated an earlier version of `launch.prg` to the latest version, here are some tips on how you can easily create a new `launch.prg` specific for your existing application.
Bootstrap 5 has been out for a while now and it was time to take it for a spin on the West Wind Message board application to see what's required to upgrade a Web Connection application to use Bootstrap 5. Here is review, some thoughts and some of my update notes.
Web Connection 7.20 is here. This is a maintenance release but it also features a number of new and updated features including support for Web Sockets, consolidated Administration UI, a new `OnRouting()` handler and a bunch of updates to core components.
In this post I'll describe the common workflow I use when I use wwDotnetBridge to check out the .NET code I'm trying to call first in .NET before actually starting to create the FoxPro code. This helps in discovering the features available on the libraries I'm trying to call, but it also validates that I'm using the .NET code directly before I start adding that extra layer of FoxPro abstraction on top of it.
Web Connection 7.15 is here and it provides a few small enhancements as well as improved log format configuration, an updated Request Viewer that makes it easier to examine the last few requests, a few Cookie updates and a wwJsonSerializer bug fix.
FoxPro's string speed is reasonably good for most operations. But one shortcoming is character by character parsing which can only be accomplished via the `SUBSTR()` command, which as it turns out is horribly slow when strings get large. In this post I describe the problem and offer a couple of solutions to get better character by character parsing speed for string iteration.
FoxPro dates can be finicky when travelling over COM and COM Interop for .NET. Ran into a nasty issue with dates from cursors showing up as slightly rounded date values in .NET which lose some of the document definition. Here's what the problem is and how you can work around it in .NET.
If you're passing FoxPro objects to COM objects and have .NET call back to you on objects that you passed makes it possible to effectively create asynchrnous applications where .NET code can process stuff in the background and notifying you when it's done or other needs to let you know that something changed. It's powerful but it brings its own set of problems in FoxPro, which wasn't design with Async code in mind. In this post I talk about some of the issue and some of the things you can do to avoid callback hell in FoxPro.
Web Connection 7.12 is here and this post goes over some of the high level improvements in some detail
Web Connection 7.10 is out and this is the official release post with a lot of detail over what's new and what's changed. This release brings a new self-contained Web Connection Web server and part of the post goes behind the rational of adding this new server to make it easier to get started with Web Connection.
Posting my session notes article from the 2019 SWFox conference about getting started with VueJS and using it for enhancing Web pages with VueJs much in the way we used to do it with jQuery.
Need to know how to publish a Web Connection application to a new Web Server? This article takes you end to end through all the steps from setting a new Virtual Machine Server, to installing the Web Server, configuring the machine and setting up your Web application. If you're coming from an older version of Web Connection pre-7.0 you'll find that the process is a lot more automated than it has been in the past.
ComValue is a useful helper class in wwDotnetBridge that provides a wrapper around .NET Values that otherwise would not be accessible to FoxPro due to COM value incompatibilities. ComValues can be passed into .NET methods and are returned as result values for wwDotnetBridge's intrinsic indirect access methods. In this post I describe how ComValue works and why we need it in the first place.
West Wind Web Connection 7.08 is here. This is a small maintenance release with a number of bug fixes and a few small feature enhancements.
You can use FoxPro's SQL Server connectivity to connect to Microsoft's SQL Azure. This post describes a few things you have to do set up your application to work with Azure's SQL Server implementation which requires a little extra configuration work.
Web Connection 7.06 release notes. This is a maintenance release with a couple of cool new development time feature enhancements for Live Reload and an updated Launcher.
Web Connection 7.05 is here! This release is primarily a maintenance release that has a few small fixes and a few performance enhancements. But there are also a number of pretty cool new features that I'm pretty excited about. In this post I'll dig into some of the new features with more detail.
Live Reload is usually a client side only feature that provides the ability to make changes to client side web code - HTML, CSS and JavaScript - and have those changes immediately reflected in the browser. Web Connection provides a Browser Sync based implementation, but until v7.05 server based changes still required manual refreshes. In this post I'll describe a new 7.05 and later feature that allows you to automatically restart your Web Connection server when a code change is made and - if combined with Browser Sync - also refreshes the currently active browser page.
The FoxPro Declare API has been in FoxPro forever, but did you know that the actual step of calling DECLARE has significant performance overhead that often is much slower than the actual API calls? I recently ran into this checking out a third party library and decided to some closer examination and found some nice ways to speed up some of my existing API calls by separating (or static loading) declarations from invocations.
Web Connection 7.02 is here and this post provides a detailed look at most of the new features included in this maintenance update.
This post contains my session notes for the Southwest Fox 2018 session **Marking up the World with Markdown**. This article provides an overview of what Markdown is and why it is useful for generic writing tasks as well as for integration into FoxPro or Web applications. Markdown is immensely popular these days as a text entry format and in this post you learn how you can easily use it from your own FoxPro and more importantly why you might want to use it in the first place.
Security is hard especially for Web applications and configuration. This post is the White Paper for my Southwest Fox session on Web Connection Security and covers a wide range of internals of how IIS and Web Connection interact and how to configure both system level and application level security for your FoxPro Web Connection applications.
Web Connection 7.0 is and here is a detailed post that goes into some detail of many of the new and enhanced features in this new release
Live reloading is common in client side applications, but server side applications generally don't have the ability to automatically reload when a server side change is made. But there are tools that allow you to monitor your local development Web server - even non-NodeJs based ones - and can automatically reload the active page when a change is detected. In this post I look at how to use Browser Sync to be more productive
I'm happy to say that I've found a workaround for the nasty problem with wwDotnetBridge and not being able to load `wwdotnetbridge.dll` due to Windows file blocking for files or archives downloaded from the Internet. In this post i describe why files are blocked and how you can unblock them including a new solution that is fast and can be done from within a running application.
If you run into problems with a Web Connection COM Server one of the first things you need to do is ensure that the server is properly registered and working on the Windows installation. In this post I look at using both Visual FoxPro and PowerShell to load and test to see whether a Web Connection server is installed and able to return a result.
Web Connection 6.21 has been released. This is a small maintenance release that fixes a few small bugs and makes a few small performance tweaks. There are also a couple of new features: wwDotnetBridge Event handling for .NET Objects, new .NET Runtime Loader with better error reporting and a new Console Configuration task to fix the annoying Loopback Check that can prevent server local Windows account authentication.
If you've ever run into a problem on a Windows Server and weren't able to run a local browser and try to log in using your local network Windows credentials you might have found out the long way that your credentials are not working by default. Recently Windows 10 also seems to have enabled this policy and I noticed local Windows account log ins not working. This comes from a local Loopback access policy. In this post I describe what fails and how you can work around it both for Web Connection applications and manually.
One of the most common questions with Web Connection that come up are related to startup errors that cause File or COM Servers to fail during startup. These errors have been difficult to debug in the past but with Web Connection 6+ a number of improvements make it easier to avoid errors in the first place, and track them down if you do have them. In this post I go into detail on the Startup sequence of Web Connection.
This week Authorize.NET switched of support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1, requiring all clients to use TLS 1.2. No surprise this was announced two years ago, but as is often the case two years is a long time away and so many were still caught off guard if you're running an oldish version of Windows. In this post I look at what versions of Windows don't support TLS 1.2 and how you can enable TLS 1.2 in those versions that didn't originally have support but can enable it. Unfortunately there are also several versions of Windows that don't support TLS 1.2 and we'll cover that too.
The West Wind Web Connection Admin page is the starting point for Web Connection Server Instance administration. But this page allows a number of administrative operations that should only be accessible by a properly authenticated user. I've been notified on many occasions that people have found wide open Admin pages and this post describes how to make sure your Admin pages are properly locked down
West Wind Web Connection 6.18 has been released. It's a small release with only one major feature update in the way of bringing back Apache support for Apache 2.4. Here's more info what's new.
There are a number of issues related to shutting down specific instances of Web Connection servers remotely. Because of the way instances are managed there are difference between file and COM mode operation because file mode instances are not managed by a centralized manager. However with a few tricks you can trigger shutdown operations in a Web Connection server by hooking into Windows Events with BINDEVENT(). Here's how.
West Wind Web Connection 6.17 has been released. This post goes over the changes in more detail. This is a maintenance release with a few bug fixes and some minor feature updates.
More and more .NET APIs expose Async only interfaces and it might seem that calling `async` `await` code from FoxPro seems like it would be difficult. I had my doubts it would but as it turns out it does. In this post I describe how `async` `await` works in .NET and how the lower Task API is used to implement it, and more importantly how we can call async methods using the .NET Task API.
Web Connection 6.15 has been released and this post gives a lot more details on the new features of this update. This release is primarily focused on server loading and debugging improvements with a few relatively small but significant enhancements that improve load performance and make it easier to debug startup errors.
Debugging startup issues has always been notoriously difficult in Web Connection. Starting with the forthcoming v6.15 Web Connection adds better error reporting that brings up an error page on failures and provides an easier way to log trace commands to a log file.
wwDotnetBridge makes it easy to load up .NET assemblies and reference to access contained classes and other types. Standalone assemblies can be loaded easily enough by filename, but assemblies that live in the GAC should be referenced by their fully qualified assembly name. Here's how.
One of the cool things about Web Connection is that Web Connection servers are persistant instances that can cache static data for subsequent requests. Besides the internal data caching FoxPro can do on an already running instance, you can also attach custom state to the server instance. In this post I'll show a number of approaches of how to access persistant object state on the server instance
JSON.NET is the most popular .NET component used in more components than any other and because of that you can end up finding other components that also use JSON.NET and perhaps with a different version. Trying to load a different version of JSON.NET in an application can cause runtime failures for loading the assembly. The workaround is to use .NET Assembly Redirects in the application's .config file. Here's how to do this.
Generating ids is a common thing for any Database applications. Whether it's for unique identifiers to records in a database, whether you need to send a unique, non-guessable email link to a customer or create a temporary file, unique IDs are common in software development of all kinds. In this post, Rick talks about how to generate unique ids in FoxPro.
West Wind Web Connection 6.10 has been released and here's a detailed run down on all the improvements and new features in this new maintenance release version.
The FoxPro editor is prone to allow extended cahracters into the editor - some of which may be invisible and can cause some really nasty compiler bugs that are 'invisible'. Here's an example how that happened to me and how it caused me to think I'm going nuts.
Web Connection supports automatic extension mapping to a single route handler by default. This typically means you can route a single extension to a single type of processing mechanism like the Script or Template engines or the Web Control Framework. However, the default behavior is easily overridable by explicitly overriding the script mode in OnProcessInit(). Here's how.
A new Visual Studio extension allows you to open FoxPro files right in Visual Studio with syntax color highlighting which makes working with Web Connection code a lot cleaner as you can keep code windows open right alongside your HTML markup pages.
DataGrids are popular for displaying lists of data and while I discourage people from excessively using DataGrids for storing data, many people do build complex and visual grids. The HtmlDataGrid() Html Helper in Web Connection provides a lot of flexibility for rendering custom column content as well as allowing for easy customization of each row and column's styling and formatting.
Calling JSON REST services is becoming more and more common and although various West Wind tools have provided support for calling services using wwHttp and wwJsonSerializer, the newly released wwJsonService class provides an even easier service call wrapper for calling JSON REST service endpoints. In this post I demonstrate basic functionality using the CallServiceMethod() method as well as properly abstracting all service calls into a dedicated class.
Web Connection 6.0 RTM is finally here and there's a lot of new stuff to check out. While a lot of new features have been added backwards compatibility has been maintained, with only very minor changes if any required for some applications. This post is an inaugrial that goes through a number of the the major features and describes them in some detail.
Today I ran into a problem with Outlook COM Automation which didn't allow me to access an existing running Outlook instance via GETOBJECT(). Turns out running as Administrator was causing the problem.
I've been doing a bunch of string parsing in the last few weeks as part of new Html Help Builder and Web Connection features and one thing I've repeatedly run into is the need to parse strings and tokenize subsections of strings for temporary exclusion for other processing. In this post I describe a couple of useful helpers that save a lot of time extracting string values and tokenizing a string for post processing.
I've posted my session notes for Southwest Fox. This post contains links to samples, slides and white papers on SOAP Web Services, Mobile and Angular Web applications.
Web Connection 6.0 introduces a new MyApp_ServerConfig.prg file that is generated with new projects that can automatically configure your Web site with IIS. The Fox code can be modified but by default works to configure a Web site. You can compile the PRG into its own EXE file or embed it as part of your server via command line switch.
Visual Studio 2015 has changed a number of internal APIs that make using the old Web Connection Add-in no longer work. To support VS2015 I've created a new VSIX based add-in that does and provides a few new features and enhancements in the process.
Starting with IE 10 and later, COM Automation from FoxPro causes certain events to no longer be triggered from FoxPro code. Due to the DOM compliance mode in IE 10 and later it appears that DOM access is case sensitive and FoxPro unfortunately doesn't support case sensitive COM calls. In this post I show why this is a problem and provide a couple of work arounds.
Errors with drive mapping can cause major headaches in Web applciations hosted in IIS because the IIS envrionemnt often obliterates existing drive maps that you might expect to be there. In this post I explain how mapped drives work inside of a system context and show a few ways that you can ensure that your drives map properly before your application starts and runs into a problem.
Using multi-threaded Visual FoxPro components often comes up for discussion and there's lots of confusion on how FoxPro's multi-threading features actually work and how they can and cannot be used effectively. In this post Rick describes how MTDLL components work and where they work well as well as what they can't do.
I've started putting together some new features and updates for Web Connection 6.0 that are coming together nicely. Here's a preview of some of the features as well as a discussion of some other things to come.
Web Connection has included plUpload support for a while, but it uses the hefty plUpload Queue component which provides a rich UI. If your needs are simpler, you can also use the raw programmatic plUpload API directly to handle uploads. In this post I show how the new image uploader on the West Wind Message Board is implemented using the raw plUpload base client API and Web Connection's plUploadHandler.
When trying to access Web Connection served JSON data from mobile device applications or from Web applications hosted on other domains you might have found that you run into Cross-site access restrictions of the XHR calls that don't allow the cross site calls. Luckily there's an easy work around using the CORS protocol that allows your server to specify which domains it allows to access your content.
When creating Sample code it's often tedious to create sample data structures in code. In some situations using a JSON string and then encoding the string to JSON can save some time and make it much easier to visualize the data structure that's being built.
Microsoft recently released a community edition of Visual Studio that is essentially a full, non-restricted version of Visual Studio Professional. The community edition is available to most developers in small to medium sized business and public organizations for free. If you're doing Web development, or specifically using Web Connection and the Web Control Framework, be sure to check out Visual Studio's Community Edition.
In light of today's SSL POODLE vulnerability announcements I've been inundated with questions regarding security in Web Connection and wwHttp. In this post I go over a few of the things to check and whether they affect any of your West Wind products indirectly.
In recent months I've been getting a number of questions regarding web connection versions. What version should I be using, do I need to install this small update and more often than not, how can I check for the Web Connection version easily especially in a running applicaiton. In this post I describe the various places where Web Connection exposes version information and then suggest how to keep up to date.
Many old applications are being migrated to newer versions of IIS and for these newer versions we recommend using the managed module. However, many old applications are still stuck referencing the wc.dll ISAPI extension directly instead of using script maps. It turns out you can use .DLL as a script map extension with the .NET module. This post shows you how and why this is a good idea to go on IIS 7 and later if you absolutely must stick to explicit wc.dll usage.
Date processing especially in Web applications can become problematic if people from different timezones access the application. UTC dates solve this problem but FoxPro doesn't have native support. In this post I look at how UTC dates solve many date issues and how you can use UTC dates easily from FoxPro with a couple simple helper functions.
Form submissions to long running requests can be a problem in Web apps as users tend to be impatient and walk off or worse resubmit forms. To avoid this a little bit of JavaScript capturing onsubmit event of the form can go a long way to improve user experience with very little extra code, using the Web Connection client script library.
Looks like IE 11 has introduced a WinInet bug for the FTP client that causes random failures due to Ftp message parsing. The end result is that in some situations wwFTP send operations can break. Here's what the problem is and a few workarounds you can try to get around them.
When you get "Unable to load Clr Instance" Errors while trying to load wwDotnetBridge, look for an unfortunate but simple to fix security issue with Windows. Here's how to get around this error.
Visual Studio includes a Web Deploy feature that makes it easy to publish content from your projects to a live Web site. Until recently you couldn't do this with Web Connection content, but since VS 2012 Update 2 you can now publish from Web Site Projects. Here's all you need to know on how to publish and organize your project for publishing.
Making sure that all links and css and script references are linked relatively in your application is crucial. Page relative paths work great, but sometimes you need to use virtual relative paths from within code or components that don't have generic access to the current page path. Web Connection supports automatic fixup for ~/ based paths to replace the virtual path - take advantage of it. Here's how.
wwDotnetBridge supports explicitly specifying which version of the .NET Runtime is loaded. But only one version of the runtime can be loaded into the FoxPro application process, and so the first wwdotnetbridge load wins. Here's how loading works and how you can ensure you're loading the right version for your application.
Web Connection 5.65 adds support for running Web Connection sites on IIS Express, which is a self contained, installable and very small version of IIS that can be run on most Windows machines with minimal to no configuration. It's a great way to develop locally without a full copy of IIS. Here's more on what you need to know.
I've posted my session white papers, slides and examples from the Southwest Fox conference last month. My two sessions where FoxPro and .NET Interop related and covered a few new recent developments that have improved the ease with which Interop can be done.
wwDotnetBridge is a FoxPro library to help with accessing .NET functionality from Visual FoxPro is now free and open source.
Unbeknowst to me FoxPro allows easy creation of custom Windows Manifests when building EXE applications. Simply creating a manifest file and putting it in the same folder as the project file allows easy embedding of custom manifests into FoxPro EXE files. Here's how.
UTF-8 Encoding is ubiquous on the Web and with good reason: It simplifies display of extended characters in a consistent manner that's easily handled by browsers and non-visual HTTP clients. Although not the default encoding format, UTF-8 encoding is easily configured in Web Connection with a couple of commands. Here's how.
The question of how to implement extensionless URLs with Web Connection has come up frequently in recent months. This post describes what extensionless URLs are and describes one implementation using the IIS UrlRewrite Module that you can plug into your Web Connection applications today.
FoxPro 32 bit EXE COM Servers don't show up in the default DCOMCNFG Component Manager. Here's how you can view your DCOM settings for a VFP COM server anyway by viewing the 32 bit DCOM manager.
Web Connection includes a small but unobvious feature that can properly fix up virtual paths. Here's how it works and why you should take advantage of it.
A question that frequently comes up is how to store 'global' data in Web Connection. While global data generally is a bad idea, there are a number of ways that you can store global data in Web Connection without resorting to the undesirable use of PUBLIC variables. Here's how.
Gravatar is a great Web Service based way to associate an images with user accounts that are based on email addresses. It's easy to use and can provide a nice touch of personalization with very little effort. This post shows how you can use Gravatar from within your FoxPro based applications.
By default Visual FoxPro doesn't do a good job of using transparent image resources on controls. With a little bit of effort however you can make your UI work properly with transparent images. Here's how.
FoxPro has a 16meg string limit, but with a little bit of trickery it's possible to work past these issues and create strings larger than 16 meg strings. Here's how.
Ran into a small issue today that deals with @K not working when using SetFocus() in the Init() of a form. Apparently SetFocus() causes selections to not be made during form startup. Here's the issue and a couple of simple workarounds.
Creating Visual FoxPro COM objects is pretty easy and painless. But on occasion there can be problems with COM registration due to the way FoxPro projects manage COM ClassIDs. Here are some of the issues and some easy tips on how to avoid problems.