DevBlog

It's been nearly a month since Sedna was announced and after three conferences, the definition of what it is and will be continues to be more clear. However, contrary to what's been said, my original views of Sedna have not changed. You can read my reasoning here.

Fox developer Bob Lee has just returned from DevCon Prague and blogged this about a conversation he had with Ken Levy, "What about what Craig Bernsten posted on his blog Ken knew of the blog, and pointed out that it had been updated, and Craigs opinion had changed." Well, Ken...my opinion hasn't changed. But, there is life in VFP and it will continue to be an incredible tool for many years.

Well, I'm home from DevTeach. What a great conference in a great city! Kudos to Jean Rene for a terrific conference.

The flight from Minneapolis to Salt Lake City had some mechanical problems and departure was delayed about two hours. Of course, that means I got home much later than planned.

I think the conference highlight for me was meeting the many .Net and SQL Server presenters and getting to know them. There are some great people there. Adam Mechanic, Peter DeBetta, Karl Franklin, Sam Gentile, Rick Heiges, Rushabh Mehta, Ted Neward, Etienne Tremblay, and Steve Swartz, stick out in my mind.

For those of you attended, thanks for helping make the conference the success it was. I hope to see you there next year.

Well, here it is, Tuesday morning. DevTeach winds down this afternoon. Yesterday I attended several .Net and Yukon sessions. Indigo looks to be a very interesting tecnology. I'm looking forward to getting the bits and playing with it.

Things are looking better for my session this afternoon. I'm scheduled for 3:00, the last session of the conference. I'll be doing 'Using the Windows Event Log from VFP".

Right now, I'm hanging out in the breakfast/vendor area. There are probably a dozen speakers sitting here right now. Karl Franklin is entertaining us with some pretty good guitar music. I guess truely, .Net Rocks. *G*

Here is it Monday morning at DevTeach, and I haven't blogged for various reasons. But, here's what's going on...

- Saturday I was up at 4:00 AM my time to catch my flight to Montreal, going through Detroit. Pretty normal flight. Montreal is a beautiful city. I have been to Canada several times before and noted the signs in a combination of French and English. This is French speaking Canada and it shows. All the signs are in French...no English. That surprised me. The speaker dinner was Saturday night. Jean Rene took us on a bus tour of Montreal, going to the top of Mount Royal, which overlooks the city. Dinner was excellent, with a choice of several entrees. I chose the lobster and filet mignon.

- Sunday morning, I was again up at 4:00 AM my time. I had back-to-back COM+ sessions beginning at 9:30 and needed to do a review and get prepped. The sessions went ok.. not as well as I would like (for a review, see the Universal Thread report). My next session is the very last session of the conference on Tuesday. Last night we were on our own for dinner. I wandered up to Ste. Catherine's street and found a pizza place where I bought a slice. The evening keynote of Indigo was pretty good, telling us Indigo is...it didn't go into any technical detail, but told us what Indigo is. We then had the welcome party at the bar. I realized that my one slice of pizza wasn't enough for dinner and ordered a club sandwhich.

This is my first time in Montreal. The city is wonderful. The people have been friendly to me, contrary to what I had been told by a coworker who grew up here. Jean Rene has done a fabulous job putting together a first class conference.

I'm heading to Montreal early tomorrow morning for DevTeach. If you're attending, please make sure you say hello.

Last year at DevCon I showed off a proof of concept that I had been working on to replace the VFP Project Manager. I got great feedback on it and my ideas along with some good ERs. However, the proof wasn't in the pudding as I couldn't find a fully featured, easy to use, affordable Tree View control, so I shelved the project. Well, it's now back on. At DevCon I obtained a copy of the dbi controls library and am ready to move forward with the project. I hope to have something to show at Southwest Fox.

A couple of items left over from DevCon. The Fox team has setup a Sedna blog. I hope to see lots of postings there as Sedna plans start to unfold. Andrew MacNeill asks in a comment there if the DevCon demos will be available? Yup...Ken has recorded a video for Channel 9 that will have them. It should be available soon.

I amd here at DevCon...for a few more hours...heading back home this afternoon. Last night was the Keynote. David Stevenson and Alex Feldstein have already blogged about it. I didn't see much new from what's already been announced in the Roadmap.

We were welcomed to DevCon by YAG, who then turned things over to Ken and Randy Brown. Other Fox team members who are here are John Koziol and Richard Stanton. Too bad Calvin and Alexy couldn't make it. YAG did say that two new people are joining the team this week, but didn't say what their jobs will be.

Ken had a slide with lots of statistics from the recent VFP survey. He said the total number of people taking the survey was up significantly from previous surveys. The one number I noted was that 35% of VFP developers are using COM. I noted this because I will be doing two sessions on COM+ next week at DevTeach.

Service Pack 1 for VFP 9.0 is currently scheduled to be shipped in December, but that date can change. It should be in beta in late July or early August. However, VFP 9.0 is the most stable yet, with fewer reported bugs than any previous version.

Ken then went over some upcoming and currently .Net technologies such as Indigo, Smart Clients, Avalon, SQL Server 2005, Visual Source Safe 2005, Orcas, WinFS, XAML, Office 12 XML, and others.

The thing that most people wanted to hear about was Sedna. Ken had one slide that say, "Sedna = SP2 + Addons". While the team has not ruled out calling it VFP 10, it's pretty unlikely. Specific pricing, packaging, naming, etc. has not been decided and probably won't be for a year. However, you can be pretty sure it will only be available via a download.

Sedna will be limited product updates. VFP is a mature product and very stable. The Fox team doesn't want to do things to make it less stable. There will be new and improved xBase components. We may see changes to the license that let us modify and ship changes to the xBase components (think anything in XSource). Sedna will also include .Net wrapper classes for use with VFP and product DLLs for extensibility. The team is still VERY early in their planning phases. The specs haven't been written yet, so much of what was discussed is things the team will be looking at and see if they can do them. However, the budget has been approved and is set. Once a beta is ready, it will be available to everyone and be updated every two to three months until release.

Randy Brown then showed some demos of things the Calvin Hsia has been working on. One was integrating with the Windows shell. He was able to extend Windows Explorer. Imagine double-clicking on a DBC and then seeing the DBFs in it. Or even more so...double click on the DBF and get a list of fields...all without leaving Windows Explorer.

Another example as something called FoxFeeds. It is basically a RSS reader that hooks into Outlook, much like NewsGator. The difference is that it is written entirely in VFP. You can get more information on both these demos from Calvin's blog. Calvin...sorry you couldn't make it to DevCon this year.

Ken then showed some things in Fox that called out to .Net code to use the WebServices stuff in .Net. This is pretty big as the SOAP Toolkit, which is what Fox uses to publish web services is being depricated. He also had some .Net code that called a Fox business object.

Ken also showed an Avalon form that was been generated and called from Fox and showed how the new Click Once technology in Visual Studion 2005 can benefit Fox developers. For example, we currently need to register Fox components to make them work in Windows, but with OneClick, you don't need to do that. The .Net app uses a "virtual" registry and keeps track of this stuff for you.

An Intellisense script and new Fox class that Mimics the "My" object in VB.Net was shown. I'm NOT thrilled with this. I've blogged previously about my dislike of My and was happy to hear it is disappearing in Longhorn. I hope to discuss this further with the Fox team today before I head home.

In discussions with the Fox team, YAG pointed out that nothing has been determined regarding Fox after Sedna. That means that there could or could not be anything after that. John Koziol said my previous blog End of the Road was dead wrong.

However, I have heard nothing that tells me otherwise. In fact, one thing that convinces me even more is one thing that was said. During a discussion with the Fox team, it was said that Intellisense really opened up Office programming and got them to learn how to program Office. The Fox team wants to have Intellisense to .Net objects so that Fox developers can learn it.

So, what's the take away from the Keynote? Sedna, while very early in the planning stages will allow us to so cool things and take advantage of upcoming technologies such as Indigo, WinFS, XAML, and Avalon that are coming out with Longhorn. I'm excited by that. I started asking the Fox team about Longhorn support a couple of years ago. I'm excited that we'll have it.

DevCon is here again. I'll be there Sunday night through mid-afternoon Monday. I'm not officially attending, so I won't be in any sessions except the keynote. Stop by and say hello. I'll be sitting across from the conference rooms or in the vendor area.

The drive from SLC to Vegas is about six hours. It's a straight shot down I-15. I'm heading out this afternoon and spending the weekend in Vegas. I'm also staying at a friend's house. He lives about two miles from the conference hotel, so it makes it inexpensive and convenient.

Hope to see you there!

My, oh my. I'm really sick of "My" everything in Windows. Just call it Documents, Pictures, Music. Microsoft Monitor is reporting that "My" will be removed in Longhorn. It doesn't bother me that MSN is adding more My. I don't use MSN. But removing it in Windows...that's a big thing and long past due.

Last week, I blogged that Fox, as a product offering from Microsoft, would disappear after Sedna. But, does that mean that Fox is gone forever? I think not (and no, this does not contradict what I said last week).

For sometime, Ken Levy and other members of the Fox team have been talking about how they have been showing off Fox technology to other teams in Redmond, particularly the VB team. No surprise there, as YAG was a member of the VB team before moving over to Fox. But it was an article yesterday on Yahoo! that got me thinking about this in a different way. The article, Microsoft to Serve Up SQL Server 2005 Preview, includes this paragraph (emphasis my own):

Sources said high-level Microsoft architects are focusing on how "Orcas," the follow-on version of Visual Studio, will more easily and efficiently handle data via future versions of both Visual Basic and Visual C#. In fact, Anders Hejlsberg, a top Microsoft software architect, is working on Visual C# 3.0 and has produced compiler technology that accelerates data integration. The Visual Basic team is working to deliver similar functionality, based on Microsoft's FoxPro technology base, sources said.

So, Fox, while I believe won't be available as a separate product, will live on. It will be reincarnated as something different -- new data manipulation and access technologies in Orcas.

Update: Added link to Yahoo! story

According to Microsoft Monitor blog, Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 will ship the week of November 7. Just in time for my trip to DevCon Germany.

Joe Wilcox of Jupiter Research hits product naming issues right on the head. In his blog, Microsoft Monitor, Joe says that using years in the name of a software application is crazy. I totally agree. My dislike dates back 18 years, when I was using Clipper. The Summer '87 version was current. To make matter worse, you needed the version with the 2:00 AM time stamp.

An article in InformationWeek (Weak) says that the US Department of Health and Human Services has signed a multi-year, multi-million dollar agreement to use Linux products from Novell. While the article doesn't claim this, I have to wonder how much politics came into play here. HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt is the former Governor of Utah, where Novell is headquartered. Secretary Leavitt is no stranger to technology. He is widely credited with guiding Utah into the information age and making it one of the leading state governments to embrace the Internet.

A new Sedna section has been added to the Universal Thread where you can post your requests for Sedna. The major efforts will be on .Net integration and using Longhorn technologies. This new section will be monitored by members of the Fox team, so put up your ERs and let your voice be heard. Membership on the UT is free.

Contrary to what many are thinking, I'm psyched about Sedna. The ability to use XAML and Avalon will help keep my current Fox apps looking great for many years to come. Hopefully we'll be able to leverage much of Inidigo too.

I got a sneak peek at it this morning and it looks great so far. FoxTalk 2.0 editor David Stevenson has joined the blogosphere with his new Talking Fox blog. Welcome, David! Subscribed.

Well, my blog entry yesterday certainly got lots of attention. Some people agreed, others disagreed, still others aren't sure, as the Roadmap is not clear. Here's how I put together my conclusion. Read on, then you decide.

- VFP usage is shrinking. When VFP 6.0 was released, it was reported to be 500,000. The last reports out of Microsoft indicate about 100,000 developers are using VFP.

- Shrinking conference attendance and fewer conferences. Steven Black has pointed out on the Wiki that all conferences have been down the past few years. Yes, the economy has much to do with it, but so does a shrinking market.

- The lack of anything in the Roadmap past Sedna.

- The fact that Sedna is some type of add-on to VFP 9.0. Most of the enhancements will allow VFP developers to write applications that target Longhorn technologies. There is nothing major on the Microsoft radar for several years after that. No other big technologies that would require additional add-ons for some time. Once VFP applications can play with these technologies, where is there to go?

- In Ken's newsletter, he states, "We want to expose all that Microsoft is planning, thinking, doing, etc. (transparency) around Visual FoxPro long term so there are nothing to assume or guess." Note the word all.

- Many, many more links on the VFP site to help VFP developers learn .Net, including the entire text of Kevin McNeish's book, .Net for Visual FoxPro Developers.

- At DevCon last year, there was lots of talk from people close to the Fox Team (but not from the Fox Team itself), that it was highly likely that 9.0 was the end. I heard some rumors of a 9.5. Sedna certainly sounds like a 9.5 to me.

- Also at DevCon, Ken showed some things the Fox Team was considering doing after 9.0. It looked mostly like Intellisense scripts to me. Things that many of us could do today.

Now add things that Ken said today on the Univeral Thread.

- "Some of the VFP team developers are helping on a project to enhance the data programming features for future .NET programming. We recently showed some demos of this work in .NET to a few VFP MVPs under NDA, and they were totally blown away and impressed to say the least." Sounds to me like .Net is getting more and more like VFP, helping to draw in more VFP developers.

- "The VFP Roadmap posted yesterday is the real and complete roadmap for VFP." The roadmap is complete. There is no more.

- "It means that everything Microsoft has currently planned for enhancing VFP is outlined in the VFP Roadmap document." Everything planned. You might argue that Ken stated "currently planned", but I argue 7.0 was planned before 6.0 was done, 8.0 was planned before 7.0 was done, and 9.0 was planned before 8.0 was done. There is nothing planned past Sedna. Plans can change, but I'm not betting on it.

- "Everything that is planned for enhancing VFP is included in the VFP Roadmap". See above.

- "So while Sedna may require VFP 9.0, it may also be more than just an add-on. The other thing to keep in mind is that while the roadmap lays out all of the VFP plans in the VFP Roadmap, things can change based on demand, priorities, trends, etc. and we are not in the business of listing what we don't think we will do or what we might not do because it closes the door to those options and hinders those in the industry involved (in this case the VFP community and job market demands)."

"So what we have done is outline our complete roadmap plans for VFP without impacting the VFP market. We have to balance a fine line between being transparent (disclosing our plans) and protecting the market of developers, businesses, vendors, etc. at the same time. Nothing should be assumed that is not defined in the roadmap."

The Roadmap has raised as many questions about life after Sedna as it has answered. Am I assuming VFP will be done? No, I don't think so. I'm putting the pieces together to complete the puzzle. I'm looking at places other than the Roadmap to figure out what it says.

Yes, I am learning new tools and technologies. There is nothing wrong with having more tools in my toolbox. Many Fox developers work with multiple languages. Just because I'm learning ASP.Net and C# does not mean I will be working exclusively with them.

I am not abandoning VFP. I will be here, shouting its praises, continuing to use it to develop the best applications for my customers. I will be sharing my knowledge with you and in turn learning from what you know. I will be writing about VFP. I am currently working on an article for FoxTalk and am discussing more articles for FoxPro Advisor. I will be speaking at conferences. I am presenting at three this year.

So, while I find the evidence pointing to Sedna to be the final version, as I stated yesterday, I am continuing on. For me, it is just a bump in the road. I hope that it will be for you too.

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.