The Open Source community, that’s where Microsoft says they intend to place VFP once they’re done with it.

I see few distinct possibilities for the future if that’s what they actually do.

First, and the worst case, is that it will simply die there.

If you know the history, Microsoft bought FoxPro originally to get the ‘Rushmore’ technology it contained. You see, at the core of the Fox was a database engine, one capable of incredible speed, even on those old 286/386 and 486 boxes with slow hard drives.

In many cases it out performed databases on much larger platforms, costing ten times, or more money.

Surrounding that core was (is) a language designed from the ground up to manipulate and work with data. It has some of the best string manipulation functions of any language I’ve ever used.

So, what I fear is that if they release it to the open source community, it’ll be stripped of the technology that made it such a work horse, and saddled with a shell of what it has today.

If those things happen, it will surely die a fairly quick death out there in the open source world.

The other, less likely, but far more exciting prospect is that it’ll land in Open source intact. A group of developers, possibly some of the folks from the current VFP group at Microsoft will pick it up and run with it.

There’s a ton of us ‘old coders’ out here, and a great bunch of young guns as well that would love to be able to tell our clients we’re building their new application on the newest piece of open source software.

The open source community is, overall, robust. It’s also made up of folks just like most of us VFP geeks, zealots, they grab onto something an run with it, and before you know it, it’s the “language de jour” … hey look at Ruby, it was virtually unheard of a couple of years ago…. It’s all the ‘buzz’ today.

Another, possibly even more interesting possibility, is that a group will form up, and using the base code, build a .Net version of VFP. A VFP.Net.

Personally I think that is the track that holds the most promise of widespread success, in my opinion. Microsoft has invested untold millions in the .Net platform, and it’s actually beginning to find some widespread acceptance in the corporate market place. It’s still behind Java, but it’s gaining.

Currently, while you can ‘connect’ to a wide variety of Databases from .Net,
manipulating that data, slicing it, and analyzing it, in .Net, is a long way from the ease with which it can be done in VFP today.

The concept of ‘Macro substitution’ inherent in VFP, simply doesn’t exist in .Net (or at least no one *I have talked to has found it), it would add a ton of functionality if it were there.

We can currently combine code from any .Net language, in the same solution as it all eventually is compiled to be utilized by the .Net CLR (Common Language Runtime), so why not a VFP.Net?

Hell there’s even a COBOL.Net, surely there are minds out there smarter than mine who could get it done!

I’ve built some DLL’s in VFP that I can add to a .Net application to provide some of the functionality I’ve needed from time to time… can a VFP.Net be that far away?

Regardless though, I’ll be devoting most of my free time now to converting my favorite VFP apps, like my TimeClock© to .Net. I can’t afford to be out of work with a skill set no one is willing to pay for!

If you’ve got thoughts, I’d love to hear them!



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