Wednesday, June 01, 2005
End of the road? Nope, just a bump
It’s finally happened. Microsoft has announced the end of life for Visual FoxPro. It was 13 years ago this month that Microsoft and Fox Software merged, bringing FoxPro into the product fold at Microsoft. Immediately, rumors started flying that Microsoft would kill Fox in favor of its own homegrown products. Thirteen years of rumors. And now, it’s official. With the release earlier today of the Visual FoxPro Roadmap, an end of life for VFP is clear.
The Fox team is currently working on Sedna, which is an “extension” to Visual FoxPro 9.0 that will allow better interop with .Net-based solutions. This will be done via COM interop. Sedna is due for release in 2007, sometime after Longhorn ships. This will give the Fox team time to test against the final Longhorn and Orca (the next version of Visual Studio) bits to ensure compatibility. Then, it’s over. That’s it. There won’t be a Visual FoxPro 10.
Some would say that Microsoft should sell off VFP to another company. I think it’s a bad idea. Instead, VFP developers have several paths. When Fox 2.x morphed into Visual FoxPro, many developers chose not to move to VFP. Others went to other tools. The choices today are similar:
- Continue working with VFP. The extensions that will be introduced with Sedna will keep VFP developers working for many years. And, there are still hundreds of Fox 2.x applications running today. VFP apps will still be running for many years to come. Plus, Microsoft will continue supporting VFP until 2014 or later.
- Move to .Net. Obviously this is where Microsoft wants developers to be. Again, the Sedna extensions should help with this.
- Move to a non-Microsoft tool. There are several options including Java, Python, PHP, and others.
- Quit software development completely and move into other areas. At least one, well know VFP guru did this a couple of years ago.
Where am I going? I’ve been experimenting with .Net for sometime now and working on an ASP.Net-based application using C#. This isn’t a commercial endeavor, but a personal undertaking. However, it duplicates functionality of several commercial and free web sites, so it has real world application.
I’ll still be here working with VFP and supporting Fox applications and the Fox community, but this blog will undergo a change in name, appearance, and URL. Watch for these changes coming soon.
So, just as the move from Fox2.x to VFP was a mere bump in the road, so too is the end of the Fox.
The Fox team is currently working on Sedna, which is an “extension” to Visual FoxPro 9.0 that will allow better interop with .Net-based solutions. This will be done via COM interop. Sedna is due for release in 2007, sometime after Longhorn ships. This will give the Fox team time to test against the final Longhorn and Orca (the next version of Visual Studio) bits to ensure compatibility. Then, it’s over. That’s it. There won’t be a Visual FoxPro 10.
Some would say that Microsoft should sell off VFP to another company. I think it’s a bad idea. Instead, VFP developers have several paths. When Fox 2.x morphed into Visual FoxPro, many developers chose not to move to VFP. Others went to other tools. The choices today are similar:
- Continue working with VFP. The extensions that will be introduced with Sedna will keep VFP developers working for many years. And, there are still hundreds of Fox 2.x applications running today. VFP apps will still be running for many years to come. Plus, Microsoft will continue supporting VFP until 2014 or later.
- Move to .Net. Obviously this is where Microsoft wants developers to be. Again, the Sedna extensions should help with this.
- Move to a non-Microsoft tool. There are several options including Java, Python, PHP, and others.
- Quit software development completely and move into other areas. At least one, well know VFP guru did this a couple of years ago.
Where am I going? I’ve been experimenting with .Net for sometime now and working on an ASP.Net-based application using C#. This isn’t a commercial endeavor, but a personal undertaking. However, it duplicates functionality of several commercial and free web sites, so it has real world application.
I’ll still be here working with VFP and supporting Fox applications and the Fox community, but this blog will undergo a change in name, appearance, and URL. Watch for these changes coming soon.
So, just as the move from Fox2.x to VFP was a mere bump in the road, so too is the end of the Fox.
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