Chapter 16 Customizing Your Development ... - dFPUG-Portal

452 The Fundamentals of Visual FoxPro 6.0
If you’ve gone ahead and changed the Help File location and now want to change it back,
you might get a little frustrated trying to figure out where to change it back to. First of all, help
files are no longer stored in the Visual FoxPro home directory; instead, everything is stored in
the MSDN directory. Typically, that’s under the Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio
directory (although it may vary if you’ve installed MSDN somewhere else). Second, “help”
actually consists of several hundred .CHM (and related) files deep inside the MSDN directory.
Which file is the “main” file? It’s not even a .CHM file—it’s a custom viewer that Microsoft
uses to provide additional functionality, like the menu at the top of the MSDN help window.
The name of the file is MSDNVS6A.COL, and it’s (as of this writing) located with the rest of
the .CHM files—in the subdirectory MSDN98\98VSA\1033.
You might be thinking that you could create a shortcut to the MSDNVS6A.COL file, and
keep VFP pointed to HACKFOX.CHM, but, unfortunately, shortcuts to MSDNVS6A.COL
generate an error.
Startup switches
You can include “command-line switches”—additional characters after the name of the
program in a shortcut’s Properties dialog—to control how Visual FoxPro will load.
Use the –A command-line switch to start FoxPro without reading the current
CONFIG.FPW and Registry switches. This is handy if one of those files (particularly the
Registry!) has become corrupt, and if you can’t load VFP any other way. Example:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VFP98\VFP6.EXE -A
Use –R to re-establish the associations that Visual FoxPro has with file extensions in
Explorer and File Manager. This is a lot easier than having to edit each file association
manually:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VFP98\VFP6.EXE -R
Use the –C switch to control which config file VFP will use during startup:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VFP98\VFP6.EXE –CF:\MYCONFIG.FPW
If you find yourself using any of these switches frequently, you might consider creating
multiple VFP startup icons on the desktop, each with its own VFP configuration and startup
switches.
Developer vs. user requirements
Your needs as a developer and the needs of your users while they are using your application are
considerably different. You’ll often find yourself needing to perform functions for testing and
debugging—while your application is running—that you don’t want your users to have access
to. For this reason, it’s a good idea to have a separate menu pad in your application that
provides access to a variety of “developer-only” commands.
These developer-only commands might include those shown in Figure 16.4.