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Where have you gone, Visual FoxPro?


By David Worthington
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June 16, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Visual FoxPro is no longer at the edge of Microsoft’s saber, but the database management system still commands a loyal following and invokes fond memories of its heyday from the community that surrounded it.

In May, SD Times interviewed several members of the FoxPro community, with an eye to documenting its contributions to contemporary technology.

“My favorite thing about FoxPro is not technological; it is the community that FoxPro inspired. Many developers live in houses that Fox [Software] built,” quipped Jim Duffy, a Microsoft regional director and president of TakeNote Technologies, in reference to the original publishers of FoxPro, a company that Microsoft bought in 1992. (Regional directors are volunteers recognized by Microsoft for their technical abilities.)

He added, “I have a number of very good friends whom I met in the [FoxPro] community.”

Likewise, the strength of the FoxPro community is what stands out most to Alan Griver, group program manager for online commerce platforms at Microsoft, who cut his teeth on FoxPro for DOS 1.21 back in the 1980s.

Griver explained that many of the Microsoft developers that had responsibilities for FoxPro came from the community around the database software. He credits the work behind the Microsoft-published FoxPro releases for establishing close ties that led to “a lot of back and forth” communication between developers and Microsoft, which he maintains continues to this day. Microsoft would rename the software in 1994 as Visual FoxPro and label it internally as VFP.

Joe Homnick, another Microsoft regional director and principal owner of Homnick Systems, said that he had “lots of fond memories” of the FoxPro community.

Microsoft effectively turned the FoxPro keys over to the community in March 2007, when VFP became a CodePlex project. The final official Service Pack for VFP shipped October 11, 2007.

Indeed, the FoxPro community remains engaged, as evidenced by activity on CodePlex, Microsoft’s primary Web site for Shared Source projects.

“It has added around 15 new capabilities to VFP in just the last year-and-a-half,” said Griver. “They localized VFP into multiple languages, and have done more work to integrate it into [Visual Studio] Team Foundation Server. It’s a pretty amazing thing.”



Related Search Term(s): Database management, Microsoft

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Comments


01/09/2009 02:57:54 AM EST

Thank you for this article on Visual FoxPro! Here in Ethiopia,they are so many government owned organizations such as banks and parastatals still running their applications on Visual FoxPro. The activity of the FoxPro community in adding so many new features is just proof that Visual FoxPro remains very much alive and is still a great tool. I would have liked to contribute a short article to tell you what my little organization has been doing with Visual FoxPro and why Visual FoxPro remains relevant for our time...

EthiopiaSylvester Alelele


11/21/2009 01:22:26 AM EST

Foxpro technolgy may be old but still it is very user friendly. It cannot be out so easily for next 2 decades or till SQL or Oracle allows to edit data in browse mode as it is not possible for them as these back-ends are highly constrainable.

IndiaN D Jaisingh


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