Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
For those who enjory database application development., September 22, 2004
Two Microsoft products that are very well suited for database application development, Visual FoxPro and VB.NET are shown side by side. This book offers many insights into database development for anyone interested in a fast start up in either camp. The book is also of value just to get a better understanding of working with databases in either language. Time went into clarify the process of creating classes / objects in both languages. I found the examples very particle and useful. Les Pinter has been known for his down to earth practicle viewpoints and contributions for many years; both in the Visual Foxpro and Visual Basic world
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Achievement, January 2, 2006
Mr. Pinter is definitively a great person, but most important, he is a great Programmer. He doesn't like to be called as a "consultant" or "another complicated word", sometimes used in this industry. Written for a programmer, targeted to programmers, this book is certainly a huge success in terms of conceptual clarity.
In his very personal style, the book guides to every former FoxPro developer to cross the technical bridge, aiding them to arrive the .NET coast, from the data point of view - after all, Visual FoxPro is a strong datacentric development tool, and .NET is a general purpose one - he could put both worlds together in his chapters.
Mr. Pinter is a living legend, not only in the FoxPro arena, but in the IT one as well. A wise witness of the computing evolution, many years as a successful programmer gave him the insight to get the essence of every problem, to get the shortest answer to a problem, to achieve a practical result in record time. He is certainly a pragmatic programmer, and in spite he still love FoxPro, this book covers the entire array of themes and issues a programmer will face when moving from VFP to .NET. An advocate of VB.NET, he consider VB as the .NET dialect of choice when migrating from Fox, because of their similarities. You can find almost no reference to C# in this book. This makes sense for a VFP developer, he or she will feel more comfortable dealing with VB code than with C sharp.
One of the most deceiving aspects of .NET -for the novice- is ADO.NET data access, due to its disconnected nature, and tiered architecture, in general this technology prevents the normal VFP programmer to master .NET data access in an acceptable time. Mr. Pinter covers this technological gap with the exact concept in the exact moment, and this can only be achieved for a person who exhibits excellent knowledge in both technologies.
In a word, "highly recommended".
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Getting up to speed in the .NET world, December 13, 2005
If you are a FoxPro programmer and are required to start programming in Visual Studio .NET, or just need to learn some of the basics of .NET, because you see this in your future, than this book is for you.
Pinter is one of those programming geniuses who understands the workings of a language and can present it in an understandable way. He makes clear those things you just stare at and can't make out.
I like walkthroughs, it's the best way for me to understand what is going on in the creation of an application, and this book is one of those that took me through both a FoxPro and a VB .NET application that can access both a FoxPro database and a SQL Server database, from the same application.
The book came out in May of 2004, but was written before that, and uses VFP 7, VFP 8, VB .NET 2002, and SQL Server 2000, but you can still go through the code in VFP 9, VB .NET 2003, and SQL Server 2005. It still works, but there are newer ways to do things that should make it easier in both VFP 9 and the newly released VB .NET 2005, but don't let this stop you, it's still a great book.
The book covers .ASP and Database access over the Internet which is the future, no matter what anybody says, and we have to learn about this in great detail, and Pinter explains it all in a manner which even my old brain can understand. However, building .ASP .NET applications in Visual Studio 2005 will make all previous .ASP .NET books obsolete in my opinion. You still need the basics, though.
I'm the type that reads manuals, and I read every sentence of the book, so I found most of the glaring errors. Some were due to differences between the downloadable code and the code in the book, others were oversites, like making a phone number field 10 characters, but I was able to get around the differences, and a bunch of other problem errors that I promptly made a list of and sent off to the publisher, hoping that a new version of the book will be forthcoming in the future using the current development environments.
The ability to access two different databases (FoxPro and SQL Server) with just a few lines of code in the same FoxPro or VB .NET program, the ability to finally figure out how to make a standard form that can be used in all my applications, and Pinter's straight shooting make this one of the better books in getting up to speed with .NET.
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