First of all, Alpha isn't paying me for this.
You guys might want to consider upgrading . . .
My boss made me convert all of our A5v1.02 to A5v4.03 in
August (over 25 M of source code in scripts, reports, and forms). While there was a little bit of a learning curve, it was actually pretty easy. I made a large number of changes to take advantage of v4.03's additional capabilities.
Here's the hard part of the learning curve. Like every other Win9x database of programming language I've seen, Alpha uses the parent.more_stuff type naming conventions. This means that while you can still run almost all of your existing code in v4, you'll want to change eventually. Her e it is:
TableName->FieldName
becomes
TablePtr - table.currnet(SlotNumber) ' if in a set
TablePtr.FieldName
Other things like the border color for a button similar structure
ObjectName.border = "RED"
Enought of that stuff (oh yeah, almost forgot, instead of using RANGE in reports you use "(betweenFieldName, Value1, Value2)").
I've beem doing beta testing of v5 for a while. There is a LARGE number of increased capabilities in v5 (web and email, ability to change report output in XBASIC using a single line of code, VERY advanced pop-up dialoag boxes - sorry, can't say more, but anything Microsoft can do you'll be able to do). I'd say more, but sometimes mentioning all the goodies gives the competition too much info. Let's just say that we are a bank servicing company and have to maintain our stuff to exacting US government standards. I'm able to customize stuff for each clientg much faster than in v1 (don't tell my boss, OK?).
We paid a Microsoft business partner (who also develops programming language add-ons - DLLs, OCXs, etc) $80K to replicate our v1 app in VB6 and Access 2000. It's sitting on a shelf in a box somewhere. You read that correctly. It couldn't match the capabilities if A5v4.03. They were experienced v1.02 programmers but still couldn't do it after 18 months. I spent 6 months to replicate/upgrade everything, including making a number of major enhancements (major automation sequnces, forms to let users do specialized reports, bi-directional EDI conversion,, etc), while maintaining v1.02 and doing all the normal operations that take almost a full time position.
Making the move to v4.03 is a smart move, even if only for the (moderate) learning curve. When v5 comes out (late summer?) Microsoft is going to have to worry about their database market share.
Just thought you'd like to know,
Jim
You guys might want to consider upgrading . . .
My boss made me convert all of our A5v1.02 to A5v4.03 in
August (over 25 M of source code in scripts, reports, and forms). While there was a little bit of a learning curve, it was actually pretty easy. I made a large number of changes to take advantage of v4.03's additional capabilities.
Here's the hard part of the learning curve. Like every other Win9x database of programming language I've seen, Alpha uses the parent.more_stuff type naming conventions. This means that while you can still run almost all of your existing code in v4, you'll want to change eventually. Her e it is:
TableName->FieldName
becomes
TablePtr - table.currnet(SlotNumber) ' if in a set
TablePtr.FieldName
Other things like the border color for a button similar structure
ObjectName.border = "RED"
Enought of that stuff (oh yeah, almost forgot, instead of using RANGE in reports you use "(betweenFieldName, Value1, Value2)").
I've beem doing beta testing of v5 for a while. There is a LARGE number of increased capabilities in v5 (web and email, ability to change report output in XBASIC using a single line of code, VERY advanced pop-up dialoag boxes - sorry, can't say more, but anything Microsoft can do you'll be able to do). I'd say more, but sometimes mentioning all the goodies gives the competition too much info. Let's just say that we are a bank servicing company and have to maintain our stuff to exacting US government standards. I'm able to customize stuff for each clientg much faster than in v1 (don't tell my boss, OK?).
We paid a Microsoft business partner (who also develops programming language add-ons - DLLs, OCXs, etc) $80K to replicate our v1 app in VB6 and Access 2000. It's sitting on a shelf in a box somewhere. You read that correctly. It couldn't match the capabilities if A5v4.03. They were experienced v1.02 programmers but still couldn't do it after 18 months. I spent 6 months to replicate/upgrade everything, including making a number of major enhancements (major automation sequnces, forms to let users do specialized reports, bi-directional EDI conversion,, etc), while maintaining v1.02 and doing all the normal operations that take almost a full time position.
Making the move to v4.03 is a smart move, even if only for the (moderate) learning curve. When v5 comes out (late summer?) Microsoft is going to have to worry about their database market share.
Just thought you'd like to know,
Jim