Skip to main content

VFP Stack Overflow: What's In A Name?

In the latest issue of FoxRockX, Ken Levy has an interesting op-ed piece called the Visual FoxPro Stack Overflow. I'm not sure if the latest issue is a re-hash of the original which was posted last summer.

It's a little like the similar page on the VFP Stack, nothing all of the possible VFP projects, including VFPX, VFP Studio, etc, etc. What would you call it? The community decided a few years back that VFPX was a better term than VFP.Next. Is that still the best term?

Perhaps more interestingly in the piece, Ken noted that the FoxPro trademark was dropped by Microsoft years ago. As a result, FoxPro and VFP can be found through search engines without anything having to do with the VFP Development tool. This is where the whole concept of stack comes up. If you consider that LAMP is (Linux,Apache,MySQL,PHP), what would a better term for VFP be?

The bigger issue here for me is that how do developers "get" Visual FoxPro, without MSDN, moving forward.

If you consider the tools that are available, it might be possible to build a front-end IDE to VFP - similar to the (abandoned?) VFP Studio, that would simply run the VFP compile steps in the background. Just an idea but it certainly is doable.

One challenge, of course, would be ActiveX controls but if you look at the work being done over at VFPX, there are a lot of places where you don't necessarily need ActiveX.

While a lot of the work I do now is in Visual Studio, I'm using VFP pretty much every day as one of my tools. Building a UI or executable for just specific pieces (such as the Data Explorer) might be another useful way of using it in a day to day environment.

Are you actively using FoxPro on a daily basis? If so, chime in and get involved in the discussion.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Unfortunately as much as I still love to work in Visual FoxPro, I have to make my living in Visual Studio. If you want to be a part of the future, FoxPro is dead.
WildFire said…
Hi Andrew... our team is currently working on five new VFP projects. Alongside with the VFP-powered systems we are maintaining.

While I do hope that someone or something 'magically' creates that 'thing' that would take VFP to a 'next level' ( awareness and IDE-wise )... I think I would rather focus on solving the clients' needs.

For now we make VFP work with some PHP/MySQL modules through a VFP+macro+cursor+MySQL coding approach. We also use some C# codes for some OS level coding.

Pretty much solves every problem so far.

Personally the thing that I accomplished which makes me feel good these days is being able to introduce VFP to two 20+ year old developers in one of our real world project.

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

5 Great Reasons to attend Virtual FoxFest

What's coming up? Virtual FoxFest is coming up soon (sessions start October 14th). Like last year, the conference is entirely virtual yet includes great breakdown rooms and sessions to add that nice one-on-one feel that you get in person. It's also staggered so you can choose which days you want to attend - October 14th, 20th and 26th. This is great if you can't break away for a consecutive three days. But really, I've gone through the sessions and I see five great sessions that I'm eager to check out. 1. A Decade of Thor (Rick Schummer) Thor has been an extension for Visual FoxPro that many developers swear by, yet many don't know even exists. Visual FoxPro's built-in extensions are great but Jim Nelson's Thor supercharges your IDE. I can't believe it's been ten years - so Rick's session should be able to not just whet your appetite but give you all the reasons you should be using it. 2. VFP C++ compiler.  Last year, we saw DotNetX as well