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

470 The Fundamentals of Visual FoxPro 6.0
Eraser
Okay, so this is silly, moronic, and makes no sense. But so is going to work on Fridays. I found
it on one of the CompuServe forums a hundred years ago, and have always kept it around for
idiot relief. See Figure 16.13.
When you run Eraser, it fills your VFP screen with happy faces, and gives you a timer and
an “eraser” (a cursor about four characters wide). As soon as you start moving the eraser (to
erase the happy faces, don’tcha know…), the timer starts running. The goal, of course, is to
erase all of the happy faces in the shortest amount of time possible.
You’ll want to close all of the windows in VFP first, and then run Eraser from the
Program, Do menu command.
Figure 16.13. The Eraser game is just plain silly.
Third-party applications
By now, hopefully you’re all fired up and have a ton of ideas for your first Visual FoxPro
application. It’s tempting to find a quiet room, fill the refrigerator with Jolt cola, and lock
yourself in until the app is finished. But you shouldn’t do it alone. In fact, the ugly truth is that
you can’t do it alone anymore. Visual FoxPro is too big and too complex for most people to
master in a short amount of time. And while you could spend months and years learning the
product, chances are you need to get applications up and running now! (If not sooner.)
Well, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel or to do everything yourself. There are a
number of third-party products that provide various mechanisms and tools to help you develop
applications, and I’m going to steer you toward 17 of the very best. In each case, the third party
has invested thousands of hours of development into creating robust, feature-rich products that
are used throughout the world. For a couple hundred bucks, there’s no way you could match the