Changes at FoxPro Advisor

[Mike Lewis]

Since this question has been raised in other threads, I thought I would explain the situation, as far as I understand it. Please note that I am writing this as a private individual; I am in no way representing the views of Advisor Publications.

Printed journals

In short, Advisor Guide to Microsoft Visual FoxPro (popularly known as FoxPro Advisor) is no longer published as a printed journal. The July 2007 issue was the last to appear in print.

Advisor also published guides for Microsoft Access, Novell Groupwise, SharePoint, Filemaker Pro, Lotus Notes, and several other products. These too have all been discontinued in print form.

Advisor is not offering refunds for the unused element of subscriptions for these journals. It seems obvious that you should be legally entitled to a refund, but, from what I've heard, you'd have to fight hard to get it.

On-line content

Advisor also had a group of web site for each of its specialised publications, including FPA. These continue to exist, but have been merged into a single site, called DataBased Advisor.

If you are an existing subscriber to any of the printed journals, you will continue to be able to access the web content, but only for as long as your subscription remains in force. Once it has expired, you will have to pay $277 per year (US dollars) to access the sites.

Should I pay?

It's up to you to decide whether it's worth $277 to subscribe to Advisor.

On the one hand, the FoxPro-related content is unrivalled. There are a huge number of articles on the site, including many written by some of the leading luminaries in the Fox world. Unlike most technical content on the web, all these articles have been carefully checked and professionally edited.

Finding an article can be a challenge, especially as the Fox content is now all mixed up with articles on Sharepoint, Filemaker Pro and the like. Just now, the full-text search feature doesn't seem to be working, nor does the month-by-month index. However, you can find articles via Google.

On the down side, there's an awful lot of sites out there where you can read Foxpro-related articles for free. Given that, many people might find it hard to justify spending $277 per year.

More information

There is an article explaining these changes at

http://advisor.com/adv/ztdbms-upgrade.

Although there's no direct link to it via the Advisor home page, the old link to the FoxPro Advisor main page still seems to work:

http://advisor.com/pub/MSVisualFoxProAdvisor

Footnote

I think it's interesting that the new combined site is called DataBased Advisor. For many years, DataBased Advisor was Advisor's only publication. It covered all the then-current database technologies and development tools, and was extremely popular. I was involved with this magazine for several years during the 1990s.

Sometime in the early 1990s, Advisor started publishing professional journals for specific platforms or tools, and these eventually replaced DBA. So we have now come full circle: the single title replacing the specialist publications.

I hope the above is of interest.

Mike





__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

My Visual FoxPro site: www.ml-consult.co.uk

 

[DSummZZZ]

Thanks Mike.
I was just reading your article on using the web browser control to display data this morning.

I forget which issue, but is an issue which had lost all color, all glossy, all flair, all adverts, ... on pages thin enough to the print from the backside of the page had bled through to the front.
Even though I will miss the magazine, I guess it's a sign of the times.




-Dave Summers-

Even more Fox stuff at:

http://www.davesummers.net/foxprolinks.htm