by TimStone » Wed Mar 07, 2018 6:29 pm
Silvio,
Perhaps you misunderstand what I am saying, or your comments confuse me a bit. Let me explain.
1). ALL of my reports within my primary application have been created over the years with the tPrint class in FWH. I have laid them out by hand. My clients are all businesses, so the data is specific, and the layout functional. I only use graphics ( images ) as a watermark, and logo, on the Invoices they create. Because there are many types of data and formats being used on an invoice, hand coding has allowed for precise output.
2). ER does not come at an extra cost. Many of us were happy to contribute to the purchase of the code. Now it is available to all of us.
3). I've been doing this programming in base languages for a very long time ( 36 + years so far ). I have seen things that didn't work become strong and effective. We have a basis now with ER to build what we need and make it work beautifully, but that means people need to invest time into it. Some will work through improving code, some of us will test and provide specific feedback, and some will provide the vision for improvement of the code. That is what makes FWH such a good tool to use.
4). You seem to think that Italy is different for programmers. However, when you mention issues, they are no different than the ones we all face. You talk about having 20 or 30 days. If I introduce something, I have a matter of hours to fix anything that is problematic, not days. Even after 36 years as a developer, I still must meet the expectations of my clients every day, or I would lose them
Over the many years I have used FWH, I've encountered a need for new technologies. I have been very appreciative of the work done here by many people. In some cases, my ideas for ways to improve standard FWH controls have been implemented quickly and effectively. Other times, my hope to have something new has resulted in people taking a lot of time and making it happen. For example, when Microsoft really started massive improvements in Visual Studio, I worked with Antonio to see how we could integrate FWH with the VS IDE. Now, since Visual Studio Community is free to everyone, and the Harbour libraries exist to use it, we can actually build VS, Harbour, FWH applications that use the very latest Windows 10 features, something our competitors do not provide. This has enabled us to do things like enable the Camera interface so we can take photos on a tablet directly into our programs. There are so many examples of how the contributors to this forum have constantly improved FWH.
I share this because Easy Report is a good start, and I believe for those of us who embrace it, we can make it a super tool for FWH. I think spending time contributing to it is a good use of our resources.
Tim