"There will be no VFP 10" 3

[Mike Lewis]

Imaginecorp,

learn .Net, otherwise you will be unemployed within the next 10 years.

No. No. No.

Excuse me for saying this, but you really should know better.

If there's one thing we can be sure of in this industry, it's that no-one can possibly know what languages or technologies will be in demand in ten years time.

I've heard similar claims made about dBASE III Plus, PowerBuilder, Turbo Pascal, VB, Multiplan, and even something called "Microsoft At Work" (which I bet not many forum members can even remember now).

I'm not saying .Net would be the wrong choice today. But to say that it will save you from unemployment in ten years time is, frankly, nonsense.

Mike




__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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

 

[Mike Lewis]

Could I take a moment to say why I won't be signing the petition, and why I strongly disagree with the idea of making VFP open source, or of some other company buying it from Microsoft.

Whatever criticisms you make of Microsoft's handling of VFP, they are better placed than anyone else to continue to support and distribute it.

All the developers who have worked on the product are still employed by Microsoft, and they are the ones who will continue to issue service packs and minor upgrades. Microsoft will continue to sell the product through its global distribution network (which few other software vendors can match); Microsoft will also distribute it through MSDN; and Microsoft is committed to providing technical support for the foreseeable future.

Let's keep in mind that Microsoft has only said that there will be no VFP 10. They have not said they are withdrawing if from sale, or abandoning support for the product.

I am as critical as most people of the way the company has under-marketed VFP in the past, but can you really envisage anyone else doing any better? Who is going to attract venture capital for this sort of product? What other software vendor can offer employment prospects to developers of the calibre of those on the Foxpro team? As for open source, unfortunately the market for VFP is simply not big enough to justify it. This is Foxpro we are talking about, not Firefox.

I'm sorry to have to sasy it, but my vote is for keeping it with Microsoft.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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

 

[Imaginecorp]

Mike: It is exactly for the reasons you have cited above (Re: Microsoft) that I recommend .Net. It is a product that MS is pushing even at the expense of us and the old VB’ers. VFP enjoyed a 20+ year run, seems like .Net is the future where MS is concerned, would it not be wise to stick to MS and their products?
The problem as I have been stating all along is from a sales point of view. Customers are usually not technological savvy, especially in our business and the investment involved both in actual dollars and training is high, Alarm bells go off if the software is being discontinued. Never mind the app will run forever.
IMO it’s a safe bet to switch to .Net.

 

[Olaf Doschke]

M$ purchased Fox to Kill it because it competed with Access and Basic. Now that VFP is in the way of .NET, Guess they will finally get thier way.

Oh, come on. Microsoft has supported and developed VFP for so long. To bring up that issue now is really stupid. If they really wanted foxpro to die in the first place, they could have killed it way back then. To say now, that it was their plan anyway, isn't accurate.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[craigber]

RedLion:
The assumptions in the ars-technica article are dead wrong. Microsoft has no plans to release the C/C++ source code to the core VFP.exe to the community or to anyone else. What IS being released to CodePlex is the Sedna components and source that are all written in either VFP or VB.Net.

MikeLewis:
To support your post, YAG has explicitly stated that Microsoft will continue to sell VFP for several more years and that support will continue into 2015.

Craig Berntson
MCSD, Visual FoxPro MVP,

http://www.craigberntson.com

Author, CrysDev: A Developer's Guide to Integrating Crystal Reports"

 

[dgrewe]

http://www.computerworld.com/action...ewArticleBasic&articleId=9015920&pageNumber=1

"For Microsoft to continue to evolve the FoxPro base, we would need to look at creating a 64-bit development environment, and that would involve an almost complete rewrite of the core product,"

Love that answer, Guess I should cry, because for M$ to use that excuse

Guess there will never be a 64 bit Windows
Guess there will never be a 64 bit Word
Guess there will never be a 64 bit Excel
Guess there will never be a 64 bit Access
Guess there will never be a 64 bit Project
Guess there will never be a 64 bit PowerPoint
Guess there will never be a 64 bit C#
Guess there will never be a 64 bit MSSQL
Guess there will never be a 64 bit .net

?? Vista, M$ Office 2007, M$ Visual Studio 2007 ??

Again I repeat. Dear M$, Take a long walk off a short pier.





David W. Grewe (Dave)

 

[cmptrnerd]

I have been working with Foxpro since foxplus. A little over a year ago I took a .net class at the local community college by my house. The reason I took this course was that I was seeing the writing on the wall and I felt it never hurt to have another revenue stream.

I have worked for years supporting clients with SBT now Sage Accpac Pro and doing custom modifications for them in Foxrpo. Now that I have heard this decision I understand how some people feel that their will be development work in Foxpro for many more years. The reality is that any new projects with Foxpro are basically dead. Who would want to spend all that money developing a project on a language that will not be supported several years down the line. Who knows if Foxpro will even run on the next operating system that comes after vista.

Hopefully someone will come up with a Foxpro clone the same way Foxpro came up with a Dbase clone years ago to allow us keep creating new applications in the Foxpro program language but until then I will be get more serious with .net and looking for alternatives as well as seeing what Accpac and Accountmate are doing for their future products.

Mark

 

[SBTBILL]

Frankly, Mark I think this kills Pro and Vision Point, too. I've heard they were going to C sharp but that would eliminate their main selling poing modifiability.

I'm wondering why MS made this announcement. Saying that an activly marketed product is discontinued is bad salesman ship. MS usually is very good at that.

I'm wondering if we might hear of some alternate upgrade path like and MS conversion of forms, reports and menues to Access or VB.

Bill Couture
http:\\

http://www.sbtbill.com

 

[cmptrnerd]

Hey Bill

Accpac already killed VisionPoint as of the end of this year. I was on the phone with Accountmate to see what they had that might help some of my VisionPoint customers with the Salesman told me about Microsoft and Foxpro.

Mark

 

[SBTBILL]

I know about Vision Point. Was at one point going to try to wrote a replacement and have looked at Cougar Mountain which has Denali. I've been hearing for the last year or so that Pro is moving to a different platform.

Talked to the dealer I normally sell for,Greg Lackerman,and he said PRO would be in Fox for at least another 5 or 10 years. Frankly if that is Sage's point of view I think Pro is dead. Course I'm part of Sage's Peachtree Accountants network so I've had questions for a while since all they seem to talke about at that price level is MAS2000.

Bill Couture
http:\\

http://www.sbtbill.com

 

[robsuttonjr]

Its hard to accept change but consider the alternatives of working as a janitor. Check out the .NET for Visual FoxPro Developers which is viewable online for free. Kevin McNeish & Cathi Gero did a great job on this:

http://foxcentral.net/microsoft/netforvfpdevelopers.htm

Don't wait until its too late to embrace .Net, JAVA or some other development path. FoxPro is dead. Doing a job search for FoxPro vs. C# etc. clearly shows this.

Regards,

Rob

 

[bobmpalmer]

Hmm well guys, check this out and you may see why MS are making this decision.

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/foxpro (vfp).do

After all they are only interested in $$$

Bob Palmer

http://www.resisystems.co.uk

The most common solution is H2O!

 

[robsuttonjr]

I don't know about anybody else but I am also interested in money. So if people are not hiring foxpro developers then why beat a dead horse. Its not Microsoft that drives the industry. They just follow suit and copy the industry. They make look like they are inovators but if you look closely you will see some company paid off to give up their hard earned idea. Any good thing that comes along, they swallow it up. FoxPro was swallowed up. They copy anything that makes a buck. That has been Bill Gates forte since day one. Have they really created any real new ideas on their own? Windows was a copy of something else. Dos a copy of something else. .NET is basically copying Java with their own twist. Tabbed internet explorer is a copy of Firefox. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter. I am trying keep my skills marketable and competitive. FoxPro is no longer a language I can market without great pain. I have to search the entire country for jobs and while I have had job offers 1000's of miles away I would prefer getting a .net job down the street.

Regards,

Rob

 

[bgeddy]

Coming from the days of Foxbase, Dr.Dave Fulton,FP for Dos, first Rushmore etc (pre Microsoft) - I for one was particularly saddened by Msoft's announcemont to kill VFP - but not surprised. I always thought Msoft's buy out of FP was to kill it. I love the UI of foxpro, the way that the data may be manipulated from the command box to test theories quickly. The mixture of a development environment, app building IDE, connectivity abilities etc I find unique. I am currrently playing with VFP front ends to MySql backends via ODBC with much satisfaction and would dearly love to see VFP go open source. I have yet to find a product that allows the instant DML and DDL functionality of Foxpro. Sadly it seems that a products abilities do not neccesarily give it worth, it's the grand plans of Microsoft that dictate (for now anyway) how we will do stuff. A products merits don't determine it's future. Given - in the corporate world - I feel Msoft's announcement is the kiss of death to Foxpro. A decision I strongly believe is to the detriment of database technology and application development. Hopefully common sense will prevail and VFP will be adopted by another platform. Here's hoping...

 

[Mike Lewis]

I for one was particularly saddened by Msoft's announcemont to kill VFP

For the last *#$%!ing time, Microsoft has NOT announced they are going to kill VFP.

Mike


__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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

 

[Imaginecorp]

...*#$%!ing..." ROFLMAO

 

[TamarGranor]

I also think the "Microsoft bought VFP only to kill it" argument doesn't really fly. That was _15_ years ago. If that's what they intended, they didn't do a very good job of it.

Tamar

 

[Ed Andres]

Looks like it's time to lock this thread

Ed

 

[ahdezm]

It seems like everybody has a bad felling about it. By now, I´m thinking on the option to learn a new tool or stay with VFP.

I told my boss a month about the news of M$ and he only says: "So what? Could you still making apps like now? We don´t care while we can solve it"

By the way, a friend of mine still works with Clipper and has lots of work. Even thinking that Clipper has been dead al least 10 years.

 

[OldBobSco]

LOL. Cheers Peeps for such an entertaining post.

Yes, I also have developed FoxPro apps since Fox+ and put up with the constant "FoxPro is dead", "VFP Sucks", "You use WHAT!", and lately... "you're not putting that app on my network", and I'm sure many of us have experienced similar comments.

Ok, so now it's official. M$ will not be developing a VFP v10 (I'm still on v8). IMO this affects us in two different ways.
People who live off their VFP experience (consultants, authors, trainers, etc.) will find markets become more limiting as less businesses will go down a dead end street.

Businesses who have a projection beyond 2015 will now look at alternative technologies for new projects and migrations for existing projects.

How does this affect me.
Well, I've been coding FoxPro for 15 years, and I do not intend to be doing so for the next 15. We grow old, we learn new skils, we change... but we take with us the knowledge and experience that those years have given us.. AND if you're as bright as humble little me ... you can apply your coding skills to ANY language currently out there. They are all based on the same fundementals.

I can take my experience and apply it to .Net (having managed to write my first C# app in 2 hours because of my FoxPro experience); thus I can offer migration services to other clients (as I'm sure 99.9% of all FoxPro developers will do).

Time to learn new skills... Does that mean RTFM! Yup

I would not tell a 16year old to learn FoxPro.. No point, there won't be the work out there for them. Instead, pick the language that is the current "prototype" and work with that. By the time they mature, then the product will have matured as well (aka FoxPro).

Thanks to M$ for taking VFP and making into what it is today. Yes I'll be saddened when the last package drops off the shelf (into a Bargain Bin), but I've had fun using it (and still will), but don't expect to sell your VFP apps to large coporates unless it has a limited lifespan... they won't touch it.. instead, aim for the Home market (they don't care as long as it looks good and works)

(steps off soapbox)





Everyone needs a hobby (

http://www.d70portfolio.com)