Must Have Tooling There are some tools I use regularly. Most of them are free, or can be donated to. Some of them, I think they are so basic, but also very special, and incredible useful if you need them, that I will put them here at the top of my list without sub-links to further posts. Go and get them, if you not already have them… Everything  From day to day, this Masterpiece of Speed reminds me of VFP's phenomenal table access timings! Once, Everything has build up its internal database (just like VFP indexing its tables), it is able to find any file on all your disk(s) instantly (take this literally)! Most of my time I'm not searching for file-content, but for filenames. This is where Everything enters the game! The latest version allows you to define you own filters! What a show! Now, I'm able to list all PRG, VCX, PJX,… files with one click! And, last but not least, it comes with a full documented API so that you can access its functionality from within VFP (on 32Bit Window versions)! Search myriads of filenames using wildcards, and RegEx expressions, and see the result narrowing down while you type (in real-time!)… You don't believe it? You better do!
Unlocker  Did you ever wanted to delete some (temporary) file from your drive and got that "Error Deleting File or Folder" error because one of your countless running applications still had a handle to that file? And, maybe you were forced to close them all, or even had to reboot your machine? Than you'd missed Unlocker! This guy waits in the background, integrated in your explorer's context menu, to 'unlock' your babies (kill any open file-handle), which is pretty darn cool! There are many free system utilities that do similar things, but, believing Unlocker's own feature comparison list, this guy beats them all…
WSCC  I bet, you all know famous tools suites like those from Sysinternals, and NirSoft. There is a very slick Toolbox Manager called Windows System Control Center (WSCC for short). It is a free, portable program that allows you to install, update, execute and organize the utilities from various system utility suites. WSCC can install and update the supported utilities automatically. Gosh, that's awesome!
SystemExplorer  System Explorer is a free software for exploration and management of system internals. It includes many useful tools and is available in installer and portable version. It is comparable to a collection of the best Sysinternals tools, plus a second set of cool, new additions!
API Monitor  API Monitor is a software that lets you monitor and control API calls made by applications and services. Its a powerful tool for seeing how Windows and other applications work or tracking down problems that you have in your own applications. 32-bit and 64-bit Alpha Versions are now available for download. My-O-My, this guy got it! His current version supports 15,000+ API’s, 1,800+ COM Interfaces, breakpoints, memory editor and decoding of structures, unions, arrays, enumerated data types and flags, and so on…
Revo Uninstaller Pro  There are a lot of Uninstallers out there. I test-drove some of them. Some offers the "comfort" to run silently as a service monitoring all of your installation attempts. Alas, very often this comes at a price I 'm not willing to pay: allover system stability and performance. Another thing I missed from other tools is to list all changes made to files, folders and the registry. Revo Uninstaller Pro is capable of all this, and does not stay resident as a service. The tool is very useful if you're doing wild COM development (with a lot of crashes:-), because it will help you to get your OS clean after work is done. Revo Uninstaller Pro is freely available. An even more featured commercial version can be tested for 30 days.
VFP - UML Designer Link & More  At the moment, my number one project is one that brings the Fox together with an open source, fully featured, COM server based, UML Diagraming Environment called WhiteStarUML. It's a descendant/fork of another open source project which was called StarUML and seemed to be dead, until revived, now showing up as a commercial (and an open source) distribution – but still in Beta state!
I would like to create a new VFPX Project from of that. Before I start I would like to hear many comments from you about my plans. Go and read the rest (if I ever got it written;-)… VFP Shell Extensions  I'm currently planning a new project called VFP Shell Extensions. Alas, it seems to grow steadily – the more feasibility studies and prove of concepts I do, the more challenges appear that must be solved/evaluated first! In other words, I need to know if such an effort would pay off in the end. One thing's fore sure: Even to satisfy my own sadomasochistic attitudes, I wouldn't go that far on my own;-) Thus, let me explain some backgrounds and what I've planned so far. I only would like to know from you, if you would be willing to pay for such an extension. Maybe I will show up a poll at the right side of my blog.
VFP's Editor Code RTF2HTML We all know that since VFP 7 (am I right?) we are able to copy & paste our code to the Windows clipboard without loosing the syntax coloring attributes. FoxPro does it by adding an additional clipboard format to the Windows clipboard called “Rich Text Format” while stuffing the source code to it. However, RTF formatted text is not the thing we need in our Blogs, because we need HTML formatted content there. Thus, we are looking for some lightweight implementation, which enables us to translate RTF based content to the appropriate HTML based one.       
Structure2Text Tool |
I use this helper to create nicely formatted structure information of your tables. The tool uses TABs for column layout which makes it a perfect fit for Copy&Paste your documentation to Excel or Word.
