( 5 reviews )
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Posted: Jun 13 2007
Les Pinter did a great job of writing this book, but with the advent of VS2005 and SQL2005, all of the examples and screen shots have changed. Some are minor, but many are not. If you have VS2003 or older and SQL2003 or older, the book can be really hard to follow. Nothing against Mr. Pinter. His book is just a victim of the rapidly changing pace of technology.
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Posted: Mar 19 2007
A must for VFP programmers migrating to .NET technologies. Easy to understand, comprehensive.
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( 2 of 2 found this review helpful ) Posted: Jan 3 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".
