10+ Toolbox Tips, with Tamar Granor

Most developers will bend over backwards for their clients.  Once I had to change every data entry textbox in a large, well-known accounting app so the client never had to put in a decimal point. They did the math on how many man-hours that would save and decided it was worth the cost amortized over the years. Whatever, I said, I’m happy to make my client’s life easier.

Most developers don’t treat themselves as well as they treat their clients; They don’t find ways to make their own lives more efficient.  Take the VFP Toolbox. It’s been there since VFP8 but most FoxPro developers don’t take advantage of it.  Tamar did a fantastic job enumerating at least 10 reasons to use the Toolbox, any one which should be reason enough to use it:

The reasons, in brief:

1. Drop controls directly into containers, and drop controls in grid cells (w/ option to remove default text1)
2. Easy access to classes for a project
3. Create forms from form classes without changing “Default Form Class” or typing a long CREATE FORM x FROM y IN z command.
4. Easy access to project documents and other files related to a project.
5. Auto-Rename controls when added to a form, or ask for other properties (sort of a mini-builder).
6. Intellisense for Mousers
7. Multiple Clipboards
8. Mix visual and code classes
9. Extensible (it’s all written in VFP as part of XSource)
   1. Store whatever you want
      1. Eg. Tamar wrote an extension to have hyperlinks pointing to bug tracking
   1. Add your own menu items
   2. Handled Moved ClassLibs