Help with purchase 1

[qlark]

I used Foxpro back when it was still FOX software and now have a project that needs a fast track development.

Can someone please tell me which version of VFP 9.0? I need to create a stand alone (read licence free VFP distribution) apps for a small (6 PC) multi user application. This app will be located on one of 6 peer-peer pc's and must be able to have all pc's run this app without having VFP installed.

 

[JimWWinter]

Visual Foxpro 9.0 Professional. Unlike the old Fox Software days it only comes in the one main version, although they do have an academic version, but that's not what your looking for.

Regards,
Jim

 

[Mike Lewis]

Unlike with the Fox Software products, you don't need a separate distribution kit. Nor is there a different edition for multi-user vs single-user.

Just buy the normal edition of VFP 9.0, and you will have a royalty-free licence to distribute your application to any number of users, stand-alone or networked.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

My Visual FoxPro site: www.ml-consult.co.uk

 

[qlark]

Thank-you

 

[qlark]

Is the academic version crippled or is it just not licensed for mutli user apps? I spent the better part of the day searching for a good price on 9.0 Pro full version ... I found it hard to understand MS's pricing scheme's ... luckily I found a used VFP 8 Pro on the internet for a real good price ... once I receive it I will purchase a 9.0 update ... after all the dust settles I will hopefully save a few hundred bucks. I realize that a lot of water has gone under the bridge since Fox Software verion 2.x (which I purchased for a premium price) but I think Software manufacturers should still give a price break to those of us that have been using and promoting their software for years ie the upgrade price should be extended to any Foxpro product regardless of age.

 

[Mike Lewis]

The academic version is exactly the same software as the full version. The restrictions are in the licensing.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

My Visual FoxPro site: www.ml-consult.co.uk

 

[Steve Bowman]

This is not a knock against qlark just a general industry observation on the low value (high expectations) placed on software product. I found() VFP 9 Full Product on the net for as low as 550.00 and worth every penny! We ask for so much in terms of Quality and Features, I have several commerical products out there and MOST people have no clue what goes into building quality software. Like the old saying goes.... "You get what you pay for"


Steve Bowman
Independent Technology, Inc.
CA, USA

 

[dbMark]

You can buy and use the VFP 9.0 upgrade version if you have VFP 5.0 or newer. That covers versions 5, 6, 7 and 8.

 

[Stella740pl]

Bought directly from Microsoft, the full version will cost around $650, and the upgrade around $350. Oh, and the upgrade is a full version, too - the difference is in the license.

Not sure what other resellers are charging, but a local small software store quoted me about the same prices.

 

[JimWWinter]

At

http://www.foxtoolbox.com

you can get the full version for $585 and the upgrade for $312. I think they also have a small s
shipping and handling fee.

Regards,
Jim

 

[qlark]

Sorry for griping about prices; maybe an explanation would help.

Assume 550 US for 9.0 full version
25 US shipping
15% exchange rate
14% Government taxes
2.5% Surcharge on Credit Card exchange
??? Unknown Carrier Border Charges

This could end up costing me >= 775 Canadian

Local Canadian distributors range from $850 to $950 so it is still cheaper buy through Online stores.

I paid more then $1000 in the late 80's for Fox Software's 2.x software which didn't come with a distribution or multi user license ... at that time it seemed worth it for the huge library of printed documentation that came with it.

The Academic Price for 9.0 is under 100 US
The Update Price ranges from 285 to 340 US
The Full Price ranges from 518 to 640 US

As stated in previous posts, the product is the same for all prices ... I just feel this huge deviation in pricing for a product that is the same is a bit much.

The bottom line is that because I found a prior version for next to nothing my final price for this product should be close the US Full price in Canadian dollars (or roughly 550 Canadian)

 

[qlark]

I have used Visual Products including OOP before ... are you saying VFP is more involved that that? From what I have seen of VFP apps, it appears the dbf's haven't changed ... I would expect the IDE to incorporate the GUI event driven constructs for forms etc. ... I am expecting that the Fox/DBase language is still at the core of the product. Yes, I will need to learn the new IDE and some of the new ways to deal with Client Server multi user apps but that is welcome ... based on what I have read this product should be better suited in the long run for the project I am currently working on under Access.

Don't get me wrong Access has its good points but I have seen the dreaded File Corrupted do you want to attempt to repair way too often. The last time I did a repair the repair algorithm decided to rewrite a critical cross tab query throwing out calculations which I missed. Needless to say the client wasn't pleased. Access also is missing some very basic setup constructs for things as simple as a printer. Each report in Access must be manually setup for a specific printer ... move the application or change the printer requires a complete reset of those settings.

Growing up with Foxpro/Dbase should give me an edge up on anyone just starting into this product ... my expectation is that I will have more control over the application in the DBF world then with the MDB world and to me that implies more stability.

 

[TheRambler]

Don't miss Craig Boyd's videos:

Learning VFP 101: Creating a Project
Learning VFP 102: Scope
Learning VFP 104: Error Handling

 

[qlark]

Thanx for the invite Mike ... Canada is a big country and sorry to say we all don't live in Toronto ... it would take me at least 5 to 7 hours to get to TO from where I live and thats by air. Spent many hours at the TO Airport and travelling around Ontario while doing Gvt work in the 80's and 90's. I was born near TO but my family left when I was a very young tyke.

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Hi qlark,

The Academic Price for 9.0 is under 100 US
The Update Price ranges from 285 to 340 US
The Full Price ranges from 518 to 640 US

As stated in previous posts, the product is the same for all prices ... I just feel this huge deviation in pricing for a product that is the same is a bit much.

I disagree. The license that comes with the academic version does not allow you to sell products made with that version. And it's a subvention of education, so it's for students and pupils and educational institutions only.

The update price can be lower, because that is for recurring customers of that product.

The full product has the full price.

That is a very normal price range for software. Remember software is a product you can multiply very cheap. There is no such price range for food, but you mey get a free coffe from starbucks, if you purchased 10 before. They can't afford such high price ranges, but selling the same thing for different prices is not that uncommon.

It's an economical calculation that these price ranges are best for software vendors, that way it seems you get the most out of the product. Bill Gates proves to be very good at such calculations, being one of the richest men on earth...

Bye, Olaf.

 

[qlark]

In this case I believe the price is based on whatever you or I are willing to pay ... economics 101 suggests that with a monopoly that can be any price. Does the price reflect the actual development cost divided by the expected market place ... I doubt it ... MS has made sure it cornered the market by buying up competitors like Fox Software. You must also understand that MS has a number of other pricing schemes not available to the general public that offer major discounts (I have seen upwards of 35%)

As a jack of all trades I do not go out and market applications just for one Product so having to eat the cost of buying a product like this for one application/Enduser is not a good way to feed my family ... but having been handed an existing application in Access coupled with the time I have wasted with it, Foxpro, which I have spent many hours with in the past, seems like the way forward despite the cost. After seeing the videos identified by TheRambler I am convinced that I could quickly become productive with this product and actually finally enjoy possibly making some money with it.

Personally I think there should be another classification for this software that would allow for a onetime Royalty payment to MS for each distributed application ... in that way small time developers like myself aren't saddled with these high priced FULL/UPGRADE prices.

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Personally I think there should be another classification for this software that would allow for a onetime Royalty payment to MS for each distributed application.

On how many (or rather few) applications would be the break even point? Two? Or even One? Are you perhaps selling yourself too cheap? For example 50 USD per hour of programming is already rather cheap. Okay, price is not equal to profit, but how small must that application be, if you may just earn your expenses with it?

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Olaf Doschke]

No reaction?

Have I offended you, qlark? That wasn't my intention.

Or have you thought about your prices? As you say you already wasted time on unsuccessfully extending the access source code you got. Migrating the whole project to VFP will take much more effort, won't it?

I must admit, my first post to the german newsgroup was about VFP prices. I was not stunned by the price difference of acadamic,update and full version, but by the price range the full version had at different sellers. So I can understand your criticism partly.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[qlark]

Olaf,

No offence taken ... pricing is a science in itself and everyone has their own opinion ... if allowed I would go out and purchase the academic versions just to try out new languages like C#. All of the vendors I have tried require some kind of proof of being a teacher and or student in a learning institution ... I guess learning on your own is not allowed any more.

Here is another twist ... why does MS provide their ASP development kits for free and still charge what I consider high prices for their Visual development languages?

I have found that Access is very closed ... it is an office tool I believe designed to quickly deal with first and second level table apps ... to do anything outside the box can be a pain ... couple that with code that someone else wrote which doesn't match any coding standards and using the default Access object naming convention of object1, 2, etc. ... it's quicker to rewrite ... porting to something new is a decision not taken lightly ... been there ... in this case I gave Access almost 2 years of effort and still haven't been able to eliminate random crashes and ill fated recoveries (staying up all night taking backups for several days and extracting data from recovery to recreate a working mdb file).

Having worked with the DOS version of FOX for many years, the language is familiar ... I have spent plenty of time with OOP and event driven software as well so what I envision is that I will need to spend time with the FOX IDE and design contructs. The bottom line is FOX looks like the way forward for what I need to do. Any effort I use to port away from Access will in the long run be worth it in my mind especially after the last year of aggravation.

I also wrote my own multi user Access app last year from scratch ... the app ran fine on my development machine but the moment I released it into my clients world it was painfully slow ... after some research and reading the Access 2003 Bible over xmas I choose to rewrite this app ... the app speed is now acceptable but it still is getting corrupted and crashes at random ... after the last crash it still took me several hours of effort to restore a working copy of this application. One thing that puzzles me is it appears that Access can become corrupted and still work for several days before it finally crashes ... this creates all sorts of greif when attempting to recover from backups.

I guess working with enterprise software development for almost a decade has spoiled my expectations of these small desktop apps. The enterprise data bases have all kinds of checks and balances behind the scenes that protect the data from everything under the sun.

Foxpro at least has commit, rollback and update logic all hidden/implied in Access ... however I expect that if I want better protection against data corruption (which is probably one of the main issues I have been fighting with) I may have to start using a product like SQL server or build a psuedo data server for data updates and creation. In other words stop updating tables directly across a network!

(hmmm an xml export file could be used by a app on the server to update or create new records) Just can't wait for my VFP software!!!

Thanx for listening
Schus (sp?) Sorry my German is not as good as your english.

 

[TamarGranor]

Welcome to Visual FoxPro. While you're right that your familiarity with FoxPro 2.x will help you, it can also get in your way. You may find this article useful as you try to understand what you do the same way you used to and what really calls for a new approach:

http://zones.advisor.com/doc/05192

Tamar