Autumn has finally arrived in New Mexico. The blistering desert sun has softened to a cooler glow and birds from chillier climes-Canadian Snow Geese and Sandhill Cranes-darken the turquoise sky in a mad race to the Gulf of Mexico before the first snowfall.

Here at BASIS International Ltd. we are seeing a similarly amazing migration from character-based interfaces (CHUI) to graphical user interfaces (GUI). Microsoft Windows has become popular in almost every vertical industry, creating an end user demand for anything and everything GUI. This desire for GUI presents the entire Business Basic market with a unique challenge: how can we give end users the GUI interfaces they want quickly and cost-effectively?

This issue of The BASIS Advantage provides hands-on examples and practical advice to face this challenge and find new sales opportunities with GUI applications. Jeff Steffanina, BASIS' own training guru, offers an overview of Kilauea and presents a real Visual PRO/5™ program that illustrates some of the fundamentals of Windows programming. William Baker continues the focus on CHUI to GUI migration with a detailed discussion on three different ways to translate existing character-based screens into a GUI format using the new ResBuilder™ and ResCompiler included in Kilauea. And Michael Martinez completes his two part series on objects in Visual PRO/5.

In future issues of The BASIS Advantage, we will provide even more coverage of GUI migration and Windows programming. In our upcoming Winter issue, we will premiere a book review column that features publications our own programmers and fellow BBx developers have found helpful.

The migration is beginning. In the face of new end-user requirements, new challenges and opportunities are emerging. There are tools and resources that can make this migration easier. Our hope is that The BASIS Advantage will serve as one resource. Please let us know what you think of the magazine and our coverage of Windows programming. We look forward to hearing from you.

Editor-in-chief