I suppose once Wally blogs about a topic, it has broad developer interest. I read the news on Visual FoxPro specific blogs earlier in the day, and I emailed the story to my coworkers. Today, Microsoft announced the end of active development on Visual FoxPro.
Personally, this is not a surprise in any way. Ever since the announcement that VFP would never move to 64bit, I've known this day was coming. Furthermore, I spent a day with the Microsoft PM for VFP in January, and he gave no indication that the future would be any different. With that said, I want to share my thoughts on what this announcement means for Visual FoxPro applications and developers.
On a DotNetRocks episode, Don Box was asked if COM is dead. His response applies to Visual FoxPro as well. Don replied, "COM isn't dead, COM is done." That is the best summary I can think of regarding this announcement. Visual FoxPro isn't dead, Visual FoxPro is done. We can certainly unpack that in a number of ways, but I will mention two details to back up that statement. Microsoft is releasing service pack 2 for Visual FoxPro 9 to make VFP fully Vista compliant. Microsoft has developed a set of .NET managed extensions to VFP named Sedna, and released these extensions as shared source.
So, we have a stable, Vista certified platform with a bunch of Microsoft developed hooks into the .NET framework. They have provided VFP developers everything they need to maintain their existing apps on the most recent version of Windows, and they have provided the tools to extend those apps using .NET. Now, I don't think anyone is suggesting green-field development with Visual FoxPro, but any existing investments are fully support until 2015, and extensible with development tools that are under active development.
Furthermore, Microsoft has provided a plethora of materials to help experienced VFP developers leverage their existing skills while moving to a new language and development environment. Here are some of my favorites:
- .NET Samples for Visual FoxPro Developers
This is a nice collection of solutions introducing VFP developers to .NET basics using Visual Basic. I recommend VFP developers download these samples along with Visual Basic Express. - Visual FoxPro Toolkit for .NET
I love this toolkit, although I've never actually used it. Let me explain, this toolkit provides a DLL which users can register to access VFP syntax within Visual Studio in either C# or VB. I've never actually done that. I use the help and the provided source code as a reference when I want to learn how to do something in .NET for which I already know the command in VFP. - Interop Forms Toolkit
This is super cool. This toolkit was developed for VB6, but works great in VFP, or any other COM enabled language. It provides a set of COM wrappers around a Windows Forms component, so that you can launch a .NET form from within your VFP app. This solution is rock solid and fully supported. - Interop UserControl
This last tool is my very favorite. It is not currently supported, but I've been in touch with the developers, and they are making progress on it. They have even fixed a bug that I experienced when using this in VFP! Quite simply, this is a project template which enables you to create a .NET user control, and register it as an ActiveX control, allowing you to display new .NET features within existing VFP forms! This is truly the secret sauce for extending existing VFP applications.
Let me explain the title to this post. Truth be told, Visual FoxPro development will continue beyond Microsoft's current product timelines, but it will not be called Visual FoxPro. Henceforth it will be known as LINQ, ADO.NET and SQL Server. Members of the Visual FoxPro development team have been working on Visual Studio and SQL Server technologies for years. Today's announcement means that they will be doing that full time.
Alan Griver gave a presentation on LINQ at the East Tennessee .NET Users Group in January, and he made the best association I've heard for the connection between VFP and LINQ. Alan said, "In Visual FoxPro, all data is converted to a common format called a cursor, and all data operations are made against the cursor, then updates are sent to their data source. With LINQ, we replace the cursor with collections of objects." That statement helped seal my enthusiasm for LINQ and the future of data access in Visual Studio and .NET languages.
I must emphasize that there is nothing to be afraid of. There is no bad news today for VFP developers. There is no conspiracy against Visual FoxPro. This is a natural and logical business decision by Microsoft. All the resources you need to continue developing data-driven software using RAD tools are available today, or coming in the next release of Visual Studio. Let today's announcement be a reminder to you to download some code samples and read some articles so that you will be prepared for Orcas.
I want to close with a quote from Visual FoxPro MVP Craig Boyd, "If Microsoft is trying to kill VFP, then they're doing a piss-poor job of it." Amen, Craig.
Cheers,
++Alan