More Changes....

Well, it's been a few weeks since my last post and a lot has been going on. First, my current contract has been extended through the end of June!! That's really good news for me as I'm enjoying the work and the people!

So what have I been doing? I spent much of the past three weeks analyzing the results of a Dun & Bradstreet comparison of the client's data to D&B data. We're at the very front end of a project to merge and sync the client information to the D&B databases.

You may recall my earlier post about string comparators. Well that work, in combination with some field weighting has enabled us to perform an initial match of slightly over 50% of the incoming D&B records! Not bad considering only about 5% were a natural or exact match.

As many of you know, I'm first a Visual FoxPro programmer, and claim .Net as my 'second' language.

Microsoft recently released version 9.0 of VFP. They issued a recent press release about all of the new features and enhancements:

Press Release
VFP features 2005

All in all a very strong new release, with dozens of new features the Visual FoxPro community has been asking for.

This brings us to the next phase of my current project. Porting the existing appllication done in VFP 6.0 to VFP 9.0! One of the things I really enjoy about contracting is the chance to regularly move to the latest platform. As a contractor, I don't usually get involved in as much of the day to day work, but instead, I'm left to focus on tasks that move things forwrd rather than latterally.

I'll be posting more here as we move forward. The biggest hurdle I see is the areas where my predecessor combined 'Order by' and 'group by' in the same SQL statement. Once acceptable in Fox, it's no longer allowed. Other than that, the port should be pretty straight forward.

Once it's up and running I'll have some words about performance and the environment.

-Bill