Franklin,
Thanks for your post and questions, hope my following answer can give you some hints.
1) We read the dbf file with our own dbf library, we do not rely on FoxPro to read it, technique speaking, we read the dbf file bytes by bytes based on the full understanding of dbf file format. And now, we have public this library out, you can go to the class GeoDbf for more useful APIs.
2) Generally we use the static APIs in TextStyles to create TextStyle for your shape file labeling, let’s say when you want label street, you can use the predefined style like TextStyles.MajorRoad1("LabelColumn") to label you street and here the “LabelColumn” is the column name to fetch label text from. Also, you can create your own style based on the APIs CreateSimpleTextStyle provided in the TextStyles class.
Any more questions please feel free to let me know.
Thanks.
Yale