Skip to main content

Visual FoxPro History at Microsoft

Ken Levy has an interesting post up on his MashupX site since early last month.
Ken Levy's Blog _ MashupX Visual FoxPro Strategy at Microsoft

The post goes into some fascinating details as to the history of Visual FoxPro at Microsoft. Most of it is well-known or obvious (making VFP.Net would break backward compatibility - which is what MS did with VB.Net as well)

I guess more details can be shared now - when VFP 9 was released, "the amount of sales for all versions of VFP combined annually was less revenue than Microsoft sales of Visual Studio in only one day"

It would be interesting to know however if some of those companies who were out there working on a VFP-like language in .Net were "persuaded" to stop their efforts, as some have suggested in various forums.


Well worth the read. The FoxPro community is what keeps VFP alive (thanks to VFPX and other initiatives) - and there were some members of that community inside of Microsoft at one point.
As he notes at the end "Only developers who have used FoxPro really appreciate it for what it was and still is."


Comments

FoxPro said…
Very much true, I have been using FoxPro for almost four years and I like the way it is compared to other tools. Even though I am tempted to earn other language to cope with the user client request.

Popular posts from this blog

Blogs and RSS come to Microsoft.com

MS has just introduced their portal and it's pretty comprehensive. Nothing quite like learning that some people use AIM instead of MSN messenger, or that there really may be a need for supporting 4 monitors ( Cyrus Complains ) However, it's really a great sign that MS is serious about supporting the blogging community which seems to have um, exploded in size in the past year. Blogs and RSS come to Microsoft.com

FoxInCloud Stats

FoxInCloud sent this link a while back about their statistics regarding visits to their site: http://foxincloud.com/blog/2017/12/27/VFP-community-lessons-from-foxincloud-site.html What's interesting here is the breakdown of people. Yes, I think it's understandable that the Fox community is getting older. Another factor is the growth of the mobile and web environments taking over development. These environments really do push people towards the newer non-SQL or free SQL/hosted environments but more towards hosted storage options like Amazon and Google. A tool like FoxInCloud that helps MOVE existing applications to the cloud inherently competes with those environments. But FoxInCloud also allows developers to extend their application further by giving them a starting point using Javascript and the basic CSS (such as Bootstrap). If you're not rebuilding your application from scratch, it's certainly a great step forward. FoxPro VFP

Facebook Revolt - imeem alternatives?

When Scoble noted how Facebook under major revolt , I immediately thought of a site I found yesterday. The value offered by Facebook's feeds however do seem very cool - if only they had been smart and made them opt-in, instead of opt-out. I have been impressed though with Facebook's opening of their API's - they certainly get it that they need to open it up to developers. I haven't really explored this other site, beyond my first look. In some ways, I think the whole social networking site thing is just silly , but this site (imeem) definitely showed some value. I could find music (as posted by the artist), it worked in Firefox and it allowed people to rank, add to delicious and more. And when I'm looking at someone, I can see what they're up to (or rather what they allow us to see). Anyways, you may want to check it out.