Desk Accessories

Hacker’s Guide to Visual FoxPro
An irreverent look at how Visual FoxPro really works. Tells you the inside scoop on every command, function, property, event and method of Visual FoxPro.

`Desk Accessories`

A collection of “mini-apps” included within Visual FoxPro. These utilities vary in usefulness. Ignored by Microsoft for several releases, once kept grudgingly in the product for “backward compatibility,” these are being phased out.

Usage

ACTIVATE WINDOW cWindowName
DEFINE BAR cBarName OF _MSYSTEM PROMPT cPrompt

Parameter	Value	Meaning
cWindowName	CALENDAR	The Calendar/Diary applet.
	CALCULATOR	The Calculator applet.
	FILER	The Filer applet. VFP 3.x and earlier.
	PUZZLE	The Puzzle game. VFP 3.x and earlier.
cBarName	_MST_DIARY	The Calendar/Diary applet.
	_MST_CALCU	The Calculator applet.
	_MST_FILER	The Filer applet.
	_MST_PUZZL	The Puzzle game.

See the individual entries for details on how each applet works.

In FoxPro 2.0 days, the idea that more than one application could run at the same time was a novel idea. In a DOS-based application, the Desk Accessories were a boon to productivity. Now, with the ability to have many programs running at once in the Windows environment, the idea seems a little dated. It would seem sensible that these applications could be retired. However, each of them brings some unique capabilities to Visual FoxPro that we think the product would be poorer without.

It seems that Microsoft would be just as happy if these applications went away. There has been little or no effort to update the apps’ interfaces. Documentation on how to use these functions is scanty, at best. Mention of the ability to use these functions from the predefined system menus, if it is in the documentation, has completely eluded us. Filer and Puzzle were eliminated in the move to Visual FoxPro, although Filer is back as a VFP-COM tool—see the Filer entry for details. We suspect the Calendar and Calculator’s days are numbered as well.

We’re not sure these applets are appropriate for inclusion in a completed application (except the now extinct Puzzle, of course—a terrific time-sink). But we do encourage you to at least give them a look to see if they offer anything you can use.

Example

ACTIVATE WINDOW FILER