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Where have you gone, Visual FoxPro?


By David Worthington
June 16, 2008 — 
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.”

“There were always rumors that [Microsoft] would kill it off; the community said, ‘Just give it to us,’ and it looks like [the community process works]. It’s kind of cool,” said Homnick.

The interviewees agreed that over two decades’ worth of releases between 1984—when Fox Software released FoxBASE, a dBase workalike for DOS—and the release of Visual FoxPro 9.0 in late 2004, VFP 3.0 and VFP 5.0 were the most significant. The third major release added object orientation, said Microsoft’s Griver, and “VFP 5.0 took the promise of VFP 3.0 and really cemented it.” Griver also noted that many users had continued to use FoxPro 2.6 without upgrading until VFP 5.0 became available.

Griver believes that VFP 8.0 and 9.0 were also important, because in those releases, Microsoft redesigned its report writer and began opening up the platform to the community.

Likewise, “VFP 3.0 was hugely significant,” said Duffy. He observed that while that release was “not the most stable version in the world,” it had a “huge impact” with its object-oriented focus.

Duffy explained that version 5.0 was important for retaining the user base and attracting new adopters, as it fixed and “cleaned up” version 3.0’s issues. “VFP became more viable as a platform,” as a result, said Duffy, adding that each version of VFP was a significant milestone.

Another aspect of FoxPro’s legacy is that, in a continued showing of its value, some of its technologies have surfaced within today’s Microsoft products.

According to Griver, Visual Studio’s data tools are rooted in VFP, and in a similar fashion, LINQ (Language Integrated Query) “owes a debt” to FoxPro by building on some of its remote view data query capabilities. “When you create something new, it is created from an amalgam of what has come before,” he said.

Duffy agreed, saying, “When [Microsoft] first showed us LINQ, it was kind of like, ‘Yeah, we’ve had that in FoxPro for a long time, what’s new here?’ ”

Homnick recalled how FoxPro “grew up on its own,” with its users often flying under corporate approvals, and how it was frequently used to create simple line-of-business applications. He added that many of those applications remain in use, and that IT managers would not dare wrest them from users’ hands.

FoxPro was a programming language and database pulled together, added Homnick, one that out-innovated dBase while offering more backward compatibility than its rival.

What’s old is often new again. Like dBASE, FoxPro was used to create applications departmentally—often without IT’s knowledge. Today, service-oriented architectures emphasize service reuse, while enterprise mashups empower business users to create their own governed applications out of services—again, without IT’s blessing.

“The industry goes in circles,” Griver remarked. But the circle may be collapsing into a dot.

All three noted that many of their FoxPro compatriots have begun to move on to .NET programming. Microsoft’s strategy “has changed dramatically. It makes [VFP] a tough sell,” Duffy offered. Consequently, he added, the number of developers skilled enough to support and maintain a FoxPro application is dwindling.

Duffy makes his living providing technical training, and is witnessing FoxPro’s displacement firsthand, but the flame’s not entirely dead. He lamented that enrollment in “.NET classes [is] up, and FoxPro training classes are down; the headcount has significantly declined over the past few years.”

With its devoted community, and with the persistence of other previously pervasive programming languages such as COBOL in mind, it is unlikely that Visual FoxPro will fade off entirely. But its status as a deprecated technology within Microsoft is undeniable. Although FoxPro’s spotlight is fading, it still casts a long shadow.


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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