VFP Tutorial - Introduction

This short tutorial is for programmers who are considering a move to Visual FoxPro from another programming language. The pages will lead you through the development of a very simple database program. It only has one table and one form but the tutorial will cover the important features of the language. Links from the main thread of the programming tutorial will take you out to other pages covering aspects of Visual FoxPro which aren't immediately relevant but which are useful.

Although it is simple, this application is based on a real-life example, it's an early stage of the VFP database which we use in the office to hold details of our programming CDs. We have been gathering CDs over the past ten years - over a thousand in all - and they're a mixture of invaluable paid-for programs (like VFP), free utilities which might come in useful, and backup copies of previous work. Until we built this database, we could never find the disk we wanted. Each now has a unique ID number and they are stored on the shelf in numerical order. If ever I need that CodeBook CD for VFP 3 again then the database tells me where to find it. The database also holds the Serial Number and Registration Key in case we lose the original slip of paper.

We'll start the tutorial with a description of the Visual FoxPro user interface, then we'll create a table, describe the programming necessary to build a form that will display the data, and the development of an executable. Links to the next six pages give step-by-step instructions:

Introduction | Environment | Project | Tables | Forms | Navigation | Executable