Monday, June 13, 2011

About Visual FoxPro


Visual FoxPro is a data-centric object-oriented and procedural programming language produced by Microsoft. It is derived from FoxPro (originally known as FoxBASE) which was developed by Fox Software beginning in 1984. Fox Technologies merged with Microsoft in 1992, after which the software acquired further features and the prefix "Visual". The last version of FoxPro (2.6) worked under Mac OS, DOS, Windows, and Unix: Visual FoxPro 3.0, the first "Visual" version, reduced platform support to only Mac and Windows, and later versions were Windows-only. The current version of Visual FoxPro is COM-based and Microsoft has stated that they do not intend to create a Microsoft .NET version.

FoxPro originated as a member of the class of languages commonly referred to as "xBase" languages, which have syntax based on the dBase programming language. Other members of the xBase language family include Clipper and Recital. (A history of the early years of xBase can be found in the dBase article.)

Visual FoxPro, commonly abbreviated as VFP, is tightly integrated with its own relational database engine, which extends FoxPro's xBase capabilities to support SQL query and data manipulation. Unlike most database management systems, Visual FoxPro is a full-featured, dynamic programming language that does not require the use of an additional general-purpose programming environment. It can be used to write not just traditional "fat client" applications, but also middleware and web applications.

In late 2002, it was demonstrated that Visual FoxPro can run on Linux under the Wine Windows compatibility suite. In 2003, this led to complaints by Microsoft: it was claimed that the deployment of runtime FoxPro code on non-Windows machines violates the End User License Agreement.


In December 2005, VFP broke into the top 20 on Tiobe index for the first time. In March 2007 it was at position 19, making it a "B" language. As of August, 2010, VFP (combined with xBase) is at position 25.


In March 2007, Microsoft announced that there will be no VFP 10, thus making VFP 9 (released to manufacturing on December 17, 2004) the last commercial VFP release from Microsoft. The support of Version 9 is ongoing with service packs that were released December 8, 2005 and October 11, 2007.


At the time of the end of life announcement, work on the next release codenamed Sedna (named after a recently discovered dwarf planet) which was built on top of the VFP9 codebase had already begun. "Sedna" is a set of add-ons to VFP 9.0 of xBase components to support a number of interoperability scenarios with various Microsoft technologies including SQL Server 2005, .NET Framework, Windows Vista, Office 2007, Windows Search and Team Foundation Server (TFS). Microsoft released Sedna under the Shared source license on the CodePlex site. Microsoft has clarified that the VFP core will still remain closed source. Sedna was released on January 25, 2008[4]. As of March 2008, all xBase components of the VFP 9 SP2 (including Sedna) were available for community-development on CodePlex.


In late March 2007 a grassroots campaign was started by the Spanish-speaking FoxPro community at MasFoxPro (MoreFoxPro in English) to sign a petition to Microsoft to continue updating Visual FoxPro or release it to the community as Open Source. On April 3, 2007 the movement was noted by the technical press.

1 comment:

  1. Visual foxpro support stopped by Microsoft. Every foxpro application move to different platform. We are doing foxpro to .net migration. This is helping application performances.

    Visual FoxPro to .Net
    FoxPro to .Net
    Visual FoxPro Migration
    FoxPro Migration

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