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Automation and COM Servers

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You can extend the functionality of your Visual FoxPro applications without a lot of extra coding time by using Automation and COM Servers. With Automation, you can control other applications, such as Microsoft Excel, from within your own application. COM servers allow you to package complex routines into reusable components.

In This Section

  • Control of Visual FoxPro from Other Applications
    Discusses how you can control Visual FoxPro from other applications by using the Visual FoxPro Application object. Applications that support Automation can create instances of Visual FoxPro, run Visual FoxPro commands, and access Visual FoxPro objects.
  • Visual FoxPro and Advanced COM
    Shows how to take advantage of the COM features in Visual FoxPro by implementing interfaces and event binding. Discusses the inner workings of early versus late binding for both client and server, COM performance, and making COM objects more discoverable.
  • Creating Automation Servers
    Describes the steps and issues involved in creating, compiling, and registering an Automation server using Visual FoxPro. An Automation server is a COM component application that exposes functionality that can be used and reused by other applications through Automation.
  • Visual FoxPro Run-Time Libraries
    Describes the two separate run-time libraries that ship with Visual FoxPro: one for most normal application types and the other for highly scalable in-process server applications.
  • Server Design Considerations and Limitations
    Describes certain behaviors, processes, and limitations that can determine the effectiveness of your server application.
  • Web Services and Components
    Describes how you can enable a Visual FoxPro application to work for multiple users, taking advantage of ActiveX controls and automation-enabled applications, and adding international capabilities.
  • XML Web Services in Visual FoxPro
    Explains how to use Web Services with your applications. A Web Service is a class (object), deployed somewhere on the Internet that you can access programmatically through normal object-oriented calls.
  • Interoperability and the Internet
    Explains how to use OLE drag-and-drop to develop applications that make it possible for you to move data between Microsoft Windows-based applications and within a Visual FoxPro application. Create documents for use on the Internet, or use one of two different Visual FoxPro run times to create COM components (Automation servers) as normal or multithreaded applications.