FoxPro is sort of alive and well
In the article “Life After dBase“, authors Doug Barney and Thomas Caywood conduct a rather entertaining and informative interview with dBASE II creator C. Wayne Ratliff. If you get a chance, have a read. I found what he had to say about FoxPro most interesting:
Barney & Caywood: FoxPro is sort of alive and well. Microsoft isn’t promising anything beyond the next version, but that whole dBASE community is really loyal to the FoxPro product.
Ratliff: For good reason. … FoxPro is more rigorous in its data approach than dBASE II was. It’s — maybe user-friendly isn’t the right word — it’s just friendly. It’s easy to do stuff. It’s easy to make mistakes, and I think that’s what all the rigor is going toward, trying to protect people from themselves. You can just get down and dirty with the data in dBASE and to a slightly lesser degree with FoxPro. If you have to go in and write an access program, and I did a lot of Visual Basic access work three or four years ago, it’s another step harder. They just keep getting further and further away and more rigorous. There are things like data hiding and safe typing and object-orientation and all that stuff. It takes more programming effort to get something to happen than it did with dBASE.
I'm a Quant Technical Specialist (Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence), with expertise in business analysis, data modeling, and data integration. I have extensive experience developing vertical and integrated desktop, Internet, and BI applications spanning municipal, clinical, and financial industries.
August 3rd, 2007 at 2:58 am
I wish Microsoft would reconsider FoxPro or sell it to a qualified company to maintain development or recreate FoxPro from scratch with all its goodies. .Net is just plain .Stupid.
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:16 am
Microsoft won’t ever sell off VFP because they’ve been using core parts of it in other technologies (from what I understand). Like it or not, .NET is here to stay.
August 3rd, 2007 at 12:52 pm
I’m not so sure I agree that .NET is stupid, but I hear what you’re saying Cyril. Alas, though Steve is right: MS has too much IP deep within the code. So a sale seems unlikely at best.
You know, if all MS did was upgrade the product to 64bit, and did nothing else at all, I think we’d all be pretty darn happy!
October 16th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Making VFP into 64bit would enable to break the 2gb barrier limit for foxpro , WHy would MS defineatly kill its own products like MS sqlserver ??
Also A word of thought
MS killed VB and built VB.net.
Couldnt it make a VFP.net ? Sure it could But there would be no more $$$ with a fast data excess , its own frontend , Easy dataexcess etc to MS as it sells Sql server on Windows servers with licences etc.
October 16th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
I’m sure it could…. but who needs .NET and SQL Server for small and medium-sized business applications when you have FoxPro?!?