Login:
Password:
Lost Password?
Print this article  |  E-mail this article  |  Comment on this article

Visual FoxPro 9 Goes Gold

By David Worthington, BetaNews

December 28, 2004, 10:43 PM

Midway through December, Microsoft's Visual FoxPro 9.0 development tool struck gold. The release, formerly code-named "Europa," is billed as the best new version since FoxPro 3.0.

Although that claim rings a familiar bell, the proof may be in the pudding: FoxPro 9.0 contains substantial reporting enhancements, embeds SQL in the FoxPro language, and is more extensible, allowing developers to introduce code that benefits their end user applications.

According to materials published by Ken Levy, Microsoft's VS Data Product Manager, report enhancements account for approximately 40-45 percent of new functionality. Due to a bevy of changes that have been made to Report Writer, users can now design with multiple detail banding, text rotation and report chaining and output data to a variety of formats including XML, HTML and image formats.

Other tools provided in the release do more to manipulate layouts and control rendering.

Currently, FoxPro lacks PDF output support, but accepts third-party extensions that make it possible.

Microsoft has also embedded SQL into the FoxPro language, levering the company's extensive Xbase heritage and clearing the way for greater compatibility as well as new commands and functions for developers. A wish list of consumer feedback has been the growth engine behind FoxPro's feature set; Levy maintains that half of all FoxPro customers already prefer a mixed environment of SQL with FoxPro.

Despite the changes to the product's data manipulation languages, FoxPro 9.0 is backwards compatible all the way through the 1980's when FoxPro was an MS-DOS application.

Microsoft has also promised more extensibility and .NET and SQL Server interoperability. Customers are told to view FoxPro as more of a developer's tool than a database that can be used with any database system. Essentially, the product is rolls language, IDE and database components into one package. Customers have said that we "blew the lid off of extensibility," stated Levy.

In a move more reminiscent of open source, licensed customers are given the full Xbase source code that they can modify as they see fit. Currently, Microsoft has over 100,000 FoxPro developers in its ledgers.

Although the 9.0 milestone is a significant occurrence in the history of FoxPro, the release has been given a shadowy inauguration by Microsoft thus far. Despite having legions of loyal developers, the Visual FoxPro product team is made up of two separate units that are straddled between working exclusively on FoxPro as well as the Visual Studio cash cow.

"Microsoft's rather stealth Visual FoxPro 9 upgrade says almost all that needs to be said about the product's position in the greater constellation of products. FoxPro has its devoted following, which for a smaller company might be significant, but not enough at Microsoft where executives count successes in the billions," said Joe Wilcox, senior analyst with Jupiter Research.

Visual FoxPro 9.0 is available to MSDN subscribers as a download. Full boxed and upgrade versions are expected to ship sometime in early 2005. The software's footprint is light: the runtime is 5 MB and a basic installation requires a mere 20 MB of hard disk space. Preorders are accepted at FoxToolbox.com.

Add a Comment (19 Comments)

BetaNews reserves the right to remove any comment at any time for any reason. Please keep your responses appropriate and on topic. Foul language and personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Name (required):

E-mail (required):

Enter Your Comment:

By jake59

edited Apr 15, 2008 - 11:26 PM

I hope my comments are not out of place.

I do not know about the rest of you but I am thinking of moving some DOS 22 year old dbxl/quicksilver apps to vfp.

I have some utility billing and fund accounting apps in dbxl/quicksilver. Being out here in the middle of nowhere i didn't get the chance to move up to windows with Wordtech selling their company and arago at windows conversion time. Jumping to another xbase was not an option since nobody teaches anything for 150 miles.

My DOS apps are still excellent for what they do. Some city clerks can bill 600 utility customers an hour. Hard to do in a windows app or even from a linux terminal.

Point is, if you are good at what you do in your chosen language and have good niche market apps, you stuff can be around for a long long time. If the language can do all the customer wants they don't care what language it is unless they think YOU won't be around to make changes.

Out of 30+ apps I have written, ony one needs email and fax capability. It is the only reason I need to learn a version of windows xbase.

There are many reasons why companies go with the latest and greatest. Some of which is to solve problems in the old language due to the bad programmer. They may be changing due to the programmer, not the language.

I have also seen companies change languages/programs because their people were just plain bored with the old program.

I mean, lets get real. How many old managers even touch a computer? Let alone know what the hell you are talking about if you try to explain what you were doing to them. Managers buy new software because someone talked them into it. They get sold on the latest and greatest features that most of the time is sold before it is ready and works!

My biggest problem is other software companies salesman. My software is so dependable and error free I may not hear from a customer for 6 or 7 years when they need a new report written or rates changed. A salesman comes along and talks them into the latest and greatest, which is more expensive and they don't need.

I remember one time a customer of my utility billing software bought into the infared meter readers. They put out a tremendous anmount of money for new meter heads and readers. The company that sold them the stuff didn't have any automatic billing software to use the data from the readers, so the clerk still had to manually go through the readers and input it into my software anyway. What a waste of money.

There are a couple of rules I go by when doing a new app. I learn the best and easiest way to do the job the way they do their job. I keep screens as clutter free as possible. And never go more than 2 screens in depth for a task. Automate as much as possible and yet give the operator the option to view data as the process proceeds.

My utility billing as an example. If the clerk bills customers in the same order as the meter books, all the clerk has to do is enter the meter reading and hit F10. Almost 120 calculations are done and totals show on the screen. The clerk can hit F10 to accept or esc to do over. You can not get anymore automated or simple.

If I were to convert that app to VFP. It would mean more keystrokes and or hand movements.

Needles to say, I still like DOS for simplicity and speed. But I do see the need for VFP.

Seems to me there are fewer apps out there, excluding games, etc, that do not touch some data at some time. If the language will do that well and all the other things soundly, why not VFP. It is easier to learn than VB or Delphi, at least for me. I might say less buggy too.

I hope VFP is around for many more years. In my looking around I see it is more expensive than the others.

I did sell my software company once many years ago. I ended up with it back for non payment. The person was a VB programmer and wanted to convert the software to VB. Problem wasn't the VB language, the pronblem was he turned out to be a terrible programmer.

There are many aspects to being an independant programmer. You have to do sales. Nothing turns without sales. Whiuch means to have a lasting business you have to balance people skills with programming time. You have to be a good programmer! There is a balance bwetween the too. If a person cuts people off, does not listen or talks down to people that do not know programmng you will lose business.

The reason it may seem that VFP jobs are decreasing may be the sales attitude, or lack of it by the salesperson. A good salesperson can sell anything and sell it honestly.

Just my 2 cents.

Score: 0

By louissirsi

edited Oct 12, 2006 - 6:43 AM

I need to know whether Vfp reports can be exported to excel. If possible then in which version i can find and from where can i find the help on this topic

Score: 0

By rhonig

edited Oct 6, 2005 - 7:52 PM

If I needed to write a Windows desktop application, Foxpro would be the best choice. It simply beats .NET's WINForms. Foxpro gets the job done faster. For web development you have .NET or you still could use Foxpro. I use C# for my web development and I long for the superior debugging tools already in Foxpro. Sure, in C# you can stop program execution where you want, but you can't query the data like Fox, you can't find variable values as easily as you can in Fox, you can't write alternative code while debugging like you can in Fox. Fox is strongly suited tied to data. C# is soon to get a LINQ which will make C# easier to query data, but Fox has always done a better job in viewing data. Fox also has a quicker turn-around that cuts the write-test-debug-write cycle much faster than C#. For writing a Windows desktop application, Foxpro is far superior to C#.

Foxpro, although able to do web pages through 3rd party add-ons still has a way to go to be the tool of choice for .ASP development. It needs a visual web interface like .NET. Will Microsoft provides a visual web environment for Fox? Will they integrate Foxpro with the web (maybe by buying one of those 3rd party programs)? If they do, there would be absolutely no reason to develop all applications in anything but Foxpro.

Is Foxpro dead? After 13 years of hearing this rumor and 5 upgrades later, I still think it's the best for desktop applications.

Score: 0

By pp@webhiker.dk

edited Jan 6, 2005 - 1:05 PM

As Mark Twain is supposed to have said "The news of my demise are somewhat exaggerated" or words to that effect. The same could very well be said for VFP.

Lot's of people have tried to talk VFP into the ground for years, and unfortunately MS has done little or nothing to dissuade us from the notion that VFP is a niche product that's on it's way out.

More's the pity, because it makes it very hard for developers to convince customers why they should go with a, outside the circle of the blessed 100 000 or so, virtually unknown product. Removing it from Visual Studio .Net was a unfortunate signal to send, and in my opinion marginalized the product even further.
Enter the downward spiral...

I know for a fact, that even the staff at Microsoft Denmark barely know of it's existence, but I am equally convinced that, if the marketing people at Redmont only would tout it as they do with Access or VB, nobody would be speculating about it's untimely death.

While it will not do everything you ever wanted to do on a computer, it's, shortcomings and all, still my develoment tool of choice for database development against client/server DB's, simply because it brings knew meaning to RAD and runs, well, like a Fox.

VFP programmers have for years been programming OO code in a manner and style that VB or C# programmers still only dream about, and all of it without lots of incredibly stupid curly braces, semicolons and intricate syntax.

I have not even seen VFP 9.0 yet, but I know Ken Levy to be a both bright and reasonable guy, and if he says it will fly, I'm confident that it will indeed do so.

That said, a bit of passion in selling it, along with tight integration into Visual Studio .Net and it's myriad of classes, would surely help a long way towards keeping it around for a while.

To the people who actually built the thing, my sincere congratulations and thanks. I'm very much looking forward to getting my copy.

After the usual frustration and gnashing of teeth, I will, by the time SP1 comes along, as the saying goes, probably be loving it.

Score: 0

By ook

edited Dec 28, 2004 - 11:13 PM

I've been using VFP and it's predecessors for 15 years, and I gotta tell you - VFP is dead. There are few jobs these days, and most people still using FoxPro are busy converting it to something else.

>> What's more, Microsoft has embedded SQL into the FoxPro language...

Hmm..I seem to recall this was done about 10 years ago.

VFP9 - Same Old Stuff with a better report writer. Save your money....Alas, the king of desktop database apps is dead....

Score: 0

By StephenAdels

posted Jan 5, 2005 - 9:57 AM

SQL has always been around in FoxPro since at least 2.6 for DOS. It has always been fairly non-compliant with the ANSI standards. Fox 9 greatly improves FoxPros SQL ANSI compliance and makes it much more similar to Microsoft SQL Server's SQL. This is great news, because FoxPros greatest strength is its local data processing, and now Microsoft SQL programmers can take advantage of the new Fox SQL without a learning curve on the SQL itself. Also, many of the arbitrary limits have been removed, like the 24 item limit to the IN clause list.
(select * where pk in (1,2,3,4,...,25) would err and is now fixed.)

Here is a list of SQL enhancements taken from the Fox 9 Beta documentation:

In VFP9, there is no hard coded limit for amount of joins or amount of subqueries used in a SQL statement.
There is no hard coded limit for amount of UNIONs in a SQL SELECT statement in VFP9.
There is no hard coded limit for amount of tables referenced by a SQL statement in VFP9.
For VFP9, we will remove the hardcoded limit of 24 arguments that are allowed in a SQL IN statement.
VFP9 will allow for multiple subquery nesting. Correlation is allowed to the immediate parent. There is no hard coded limit for nesting depth.
We will allow for UNION clause in a SQL INSERT statement FROM clause.
SQL - Allow GROUP BY in Correlated Subquery
SQL - Allow ORDER BY in Conjunction with TOP N Inside of Non-Correlated Subquery
SQL - Allow Sub-SELECT in FROM Clause
SQL - Allow Subquery in SELECT List (Projection)
VFP9 will allow subquery as a column or a part of expression in projection.
SQL – Allow ORDER BY Using Field Name with UNION Clause
In VFP8, as soon as one uses the UNION clause, you need to use numeric references
and can no longer use the field name for the ORDER BY clause.
In VFP9, we will remove this restriction such as in following example:
SQL – Allow Subquery in UPDATE SET List - VFP9 will allow for a subquery in UPDATE SET clause.
SQL – Support for Correlated UPDATE
SQL – Support for Correlated DELETE
SQL – Optimize LIKE "sometext%" Performance
SQL – Optimize TOP N Performance
SQL – New Support for Local Buffered Data
SET SQLBUFFERING ON | OFF - If data is not buffered, we simply grab from disk.
SQL – Allow Aggregate Functions in SELECT List of a Subquery Compared Using { | >=} {ALL | ANY | SOME}
SET ENGINEBEHAVIOR 70 ! 80 ! 90 - We will update the SET ENGINEBEHAVIOR command to change the SQL behavior
SET ENGINEBEHAVIOR 90 - Specifies that VFP treats SQL commands with the standard VFP 9.0 behavior.

Score: 0

By SarekOfVulcan

posted Dec 29, 2004 - 11:29 PM

Huh, funny how I'm seeing more VFP jobs posted in recent months than in a long time.

Score: 0

By gradymcc

posted Dec 29, 2004 - 7:32 PM

Isn't that odd? I have made a good living with VFP. It's tight, fast and a delight to use.

Let's hope the good people at Beta News will remove your unfounded attack as soon as they see it.

Score: 0

By spiked

posted Jan 1, 2005 - 10:31 PM

I don't see how you can call ook's rational opinion an "attack." You might disagree, and to a small extent I disagree with ook, too. But for the most part, he's right that VFP is riding into the sunset.

VFP has been a great tool and Microsoft has done an admirable job of equipping it with modern capabilities for people with existing investments in VFP and xBase, but with each passing year VFP becomes a poorer choice for developing major new apps. Basically, people write new apps in VFP if they need a small quick-n-dirty which can reuse some existing chunks of VFP code, or if they need to access DBF files (especially if there are associated DBC/FPT/CDX files). But hardly anybody who can justify the cost of major rework on an existing VFP app will actually do it in VFP. If the app needs a large enough amount of work, and there budget is available for a lot of work, there are very few organizations left who wouldn't rewrite in something else.

There will still be lots of VFP code written 10 years from now, but VFP has matured as much as it ever will. There will never again be a thick FoxPro Advisor with exciting new techniques for Foundation READs. You are never going to download VFP source code for a BitTorrent client from SourceForge. In other words, VFP is not going away, but it's not going anywhere.

If you compare the typical VFP code written in 1997 with what was typical in 1992, you could still see progress happening. The language was still evolving, people were still finding new ways to exploit it. If you compare what people wrote in 2004 with what they wrote in 1999, you see that they've added SYS(2700) to enable Windows XP themes. That's pretty much it. Comparing VFP 9.0 to 3.0 is an insult to the 3.0 team. The new report writer may be a nice productivity-booster, but how can you compare it to the OOP extensions, true event handling, DBC-based triggers, and Win32 support added in 3.0? I was in San Diego at FoxPro DevCon '95. I knew Taz. I worked with Taz. Taz was a friend of mine. Mister Europa, YOU ARE NO TAZ.

There are a certain number of programmers who will quietly make a comfortable living on VFP for the next decade, because there are too many niche LOB/vertical apps in the world which their owners cannot justify rewriting, solely for the sake of moving to a more popular/modern language. If you're one of these folks, I wish you the best and I thank you for doing a thankless but necessary job. But let's face reality: the best days of VFP's life are in the past. It's a dead-end product.

Score: 0

By SarekOfVulcan

edited Jan 5, 2005 - 1:01 AM

A "rational opinion" is one thing.

"Most people working in Fox are converting away from it" is neither founded nor an opinion. It's an attempt to be a statement of fact, with no actual data to back it up.

And the reason you're not going to download a VFP BitTorrent client from SourceForge is that VFP is a data language. The only data handling here would involve tracking what you've downloaded.

Now, downloading a trucking dispatch application written in VFP from SourceForge, _that_ I can see.

Score: 0

By ook

posted Dec 31, 2004 - 8:34 PM

I too have made a good living from VFP and FoxPro and FoxBASE for more then 15 years. But my "attack" as you called it is not unfounded. Look at the numbers. The number of VFP developers and jobs has been dropping every year for years. My current project is a conversion of a large VFP app to dot net (a type of project that we are seeing more and more of these days). We spent a lot of time evaluating our options, talking to "experts" and consultants. In the end, we could not find one person that would stand up and say that we should keep the product in VFP. We even hired a well known VFP developer, and they too agreed that VFP was no longer the path to follow. Microsoft themselves won't promote VFP. Wake up and smell the ashes, guys. I love VFP, I've used it and it's predecessor for over 15 years, but it's all but over for VFP.

Score: 0

By carbonfiber

posted Jan 13, 2005 - 10:52 AM

VFP is in decline, but it is not "dead" or Microsoft would not have released a new version. As a response to a product announcement, your comments are no more welcome here than if someone stood up at a wedding and said out loud that the bride is a slut. Whatever truth might exist in your comments, all your doing is raining on someone elses parade. Since VFP isn't for you anymore, move on with what you are doing in your professional life and leave VFP alone.

Score: 0

By TheDeveloper

posted Jan 19, 2005 - 2:57 PM

There is something strangely resilient about FoxPro, people who develop with it, the applications created by it, and the people who use those applications. I can see a parallel between the way the industry treats FoxPro and the way my company treats it. My company has been trying to phase out FoxPro and its apps for about 18 years now (FoxBase). Of course Oracle and PeopleSoft run the enterprise, but its those %^$#@ FoxPro applications that makes us look like we know what we are doing in the eyes of our customers. My Fox apps have be banned in 7 departments, and straight prohibited in 1 department. But my users keep using them. Why? Because they work year after year. I’ve been a Fox Developer since 1987, but it wasn’t until I got my MSCD certification that people said, “Gee, he really can program computers”. There is a certain spirit that goes along with being a FoxPro programmer. Those of you that have it or have seen it in action know what I am talking about. So how do you kill a spirit, a mindset, or a way of Being. The spirit of FoxPro has been around along time, ask Achilles, Alexander, David, Arthur, Luther, Attucks, and Beamer. FOX APPS DON’T DIE, THEY JUST MULTIPLY.

Score: 0

By smilermtl

edited Jan 8, 2006 - 5:00 PM

I like that comment ;o) Seriously. I totally agree that Fox is going away. But seriously. Small/Med sized business just can't find any other solution to develop fast, *flexible* (please keep that word in mind) and easy to integrate product.

Our company specialises in software consulting in the mid-sized business area, we just can't drop foxpro for the moment.

I wouldn't say that a Fox-based solution is the best for a 500+ user system, this is for Java or .NET solutions.

100- user sites ? We have the same needs than a large corporation, but we need fast development. VFP has forever marked OOP RAD world.

RAD ? Tell me another product that is "as" RAD than Fox.

Give me only one, ONLY ONE product that let you create rapidly, a mangement system, integrated e-commerce solutions, faxing, emailing, *REAL UI* (not simple web based links). Productivity, is the key.

I will probably drop FoxPro development within the next 5-10 years, that's for sure, our company needs to be comptetitive & up-to-date, but please, someone, resurect the spirit of Fox developpers, we have a lot to learn from the way Fox people do things.

Web is the future ? OK. Let's go with the flow. We'll see...

Ahh.. I'll miss you fox.

Score: 0

By tamayok

edited May 29, 2005 - 5:11 PM

FoxPro has always been a fantastic tool and Visual FoxPro 9.0 is EXCELLENT! Amongst it's many strengths is that of easily integrating a wide spectrum of other technologies into applications... Whether it is Macromedia Flash, SQL, XML, etc. etc. etc. Recent native features are also a pleasure to deal with BINDEVENTS(), Intellisense, Hot-Buttons, AutoComplete, the new Report Writer, Context Menus, etc. etc. etc.

All this for a mere $300-$600...!!!! Visual FoxPro still is the best tool out there for a huge number of applications. Often it is the key component behind 90% of the applications but receives virtually no visibility/merit.

Score: 0

By corrigpb

edited Oct 29, 2005 - 7:22 PM

I'm probably the only FoxPro developer left in Ireland.!It is a fabulous development environment and has maintained its technical strength all the way from ver 3.0 to the current release.
The problem is this !
The Microsoft world is powered by marketeers
who need to turn the 'fast' buck.
The FoxPro Integrated Development Environment
is so powerful that you do not need to buy anything else in order to produce Professional systems.(o.k. so you won't use it to control Nuclear power stations, but hey who cares!.)
So the answer is that FoxPro is a major threat
to the core Microsoft Stable of products, and the 'marketed' parts of Visual Studio.
So they have it in their stable, they sit on it 'till it dies, or until we all wake up and challenge them legally by offering to buy it from them !.
If we do not the whole Foxpro world will(is) dying.

Score: 0

By torakun

edited Jan 24, 2006 - 10:24 AM

What about the companies that have started having there FoxPro applications converted to .NET and SQL only to find out that it has taken over 2 years and has cost thousands? I'm in that boat right now. My department is not only in fox but I have built and rebuilt 16 databases in a year’s time and our IT staff can't figure out how to get one done. What I have done in Fox, our IT can't touch with .NET. FoxPro can build an application the way my users want it. VB.NET builds an application the way the IT staff is confined to build it. This could be just the IT staff in my department but they have gone to the training and work with it everyday. I learned FoxPro in three months by myself, and can run circles around my IT staff. I'm not even a computer geek. I consider FoxPro more of a hobby. I think Microsoft is scared to shine light on FoxPro because it has always been the stepchild. Could you imagine Fox.NET, developers would have more application built for the web then you could shake a stick at. I don't feel FoxPro is going away, even if it did my department wouldn't need to upgrade for a generation. It doesn't take anything to maintain Fox once it's up and running and things are in place in case of a complete meltdown. I see Fox slowly merging into the VB side of things and even perhaps replacing VB code with Fox code to some degree.

Score: 0

By rajesh_chd

edited May 4, 2006 - 6:11 AM

Yes foxpro is getting less popular but it was and still is best tool for desktop applications development. In our company we have migrated most of our applications to oracle but in the most typical application (production planning & control) users are not ready to leave the foxpro package which I built 10 years back. Our IT staff gave them 3 packages (1 in vb, 1 in asp and now 1 in asp.net) but they still find some ways to continue working with old foxy.

Score: 0

By pj101

edited Aug 4, 2006 - 7:48 PM

Fox is a powerful development tool with a proven track record. Macro substitution is an amazinginly simple solution that few other languages offer. The cost of developing, maintaining and deploying Fox apps is stunningly low. New languages come and go but the bottom line is a slick user interface, database access, scalability (up-size to SQL-Server tables with Fox front-end...this works great) and reliability. Don't give up on Fox yet. I do hold Microsoft responsible for tarnishing it's image. It is all about money. What we need is an open-source version of this RAD tool!!!

Score: 0

Nov 21 - 6:51 PM ET Coalition urges better laws for e-mail and cell phone privacy

Nov 21 - 6:42 PM ET How is Internet advertising faring in this bad economy?

Nov 21 - 6:15 PM ET From out of the Amazon Cloud, an AWS winner emerges

Nov 21 - 5:20 PM ET Mufin music finder enters public beta, adds widgets

Nov 21 - 5:01 PM ET Google launches its SearchWiki semantics plug-in

Nov 21 - 4:57 PM ET Asus previews a slimmer, less costly Eee PC

Nov 21 - 4:32 PM ET New Adobe Media Player ushers in AIR 1.5

Nov 21 - 2:11 PM ET AT&T to add Pantech's low-cost C630 phone to 3G lineup

Nov 21 - 1:11 PM ET iPhone gets firmware 2.2 update

Nov 21 - 11:51 AM ET The Dell surprise: Higher earnings on lower revenue