Visual FoxPro 8.0

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VFP is not your daddy's Xbase - its a powerful OOP development language with 90+% of the functionality of C# (a similar syntax in many areas) and VB.NET without all the overhead. You can build classic "VB" like fat client applications with a rich GUI that includes XP themes support. You can also build XML enabled applications with full SOAP support, OLE data providers, web services compatible with .NET, and multi-threaded COM objects - all out-of-the-box.

VFP 8 was just released and work is already underway on VFP 9. A quick review of MS's support web site indicates that support for VFP 8 is promised until 2010 - BTW: The same time frame for .NET SDK 1.1 applications. MS has posted VFP endorsement and support videos from Steve Ballmer and Eric Rudder (key architect of VFP and then of .NET). VFP has the largest number of MS MVP's and a large and loyal user base.

A zipped VFP 8 (royalty free) runtime (with GDIPLUS and MSCVRT7 DLLs) comes in at less than 4M and doesn't require any component registration. Nor does it require any lengthy service pack upgrades! That 4M includes a powerful data engine supporting buffering, transactions, triggers; report engine; and runtime compiler. Like .NET applications, a VFP application can be installed via a simple XCOPY to the application's folder. VFP 8 applications officially run on all versions of Windows except 95. Unofficially, VFP 8 applications run fine on Windows 95 as long as the DCOM service pack has been applied. There's also a growing grass roots initiative to support VFP under Linux (lots of press on this initiative as we speak).

A quick list of .NET like features in VFP
- OOP architecture designed by Eric Rudder, Sr. VP of the Developer & Platform Evangelism Division
- full OOP inheritance model (even ActiveX controls can be subclassed)
- full complement of common classes including empty class, collection classes, container classes, etc.
- full support for structured error handling: try/catch/finally and exception objects
- full reflection capabilities
- full support for XML import/export including hierarchical XML and XML 2-way DiffGram communication with ADO.NET data sets
- full support for XML web services (publish and consume SOAP based XML over HTTP/S)
- full SQL server and ODBC support (Oracle, mySQL, DB2, etc) (these in addition to VFP's built-in data engine)
- event binding for all internal VFP PEM's
- event binding for ActiveX and COM objects
- access and assign methods

Some other cool features
- full support for XP Themes "out-of-the-box"
- rich collection of built-in, sub-classable GUI components (grid, pageframes, image, lists, combos, spinners, textbox, editbox, command buttons, etc)
- full support for 3rd party ActiveX controls and COM components and many 3rd party DLL's
- GDIPlus support for all image types (GIF, JPG, TIF, PNG, etc)
- powerful textmerge capability for quickly generating text output with ASP like scripting capabilities
- the ability to compile and full programs on-the-fly via execscript()
- extremely powerful and fast string and array handling
- persistence for simple data types
- extensive support for business object type classes via
- cursoradapter object for universal data support (abstracts data engine; supports native DBF, SQL Server 2000, Oracle, mySQL, etc.

Plus, what I would maintain is MS's richest development IDE
- all meta code (forms, classes, projects, reports, etc) stored in documented table formats
- project hooks during application compilation
- customizable builder technology for creating developer tools that run in the IDE
- FULL control over Intellisense behavior
- a live command window where multi-line code snippets can be developed and debugged
- task pane with live connections (via SOAP/web services) to internet sites
- source code for wizards and code generators
- full control over event logging , debug output, and assert handling
- coverage analyzer

And all that is just a start. If any of your readers (especially disgruntled VB developers) have any questions about VFP, I would be happy to answer them. Or if they're MSDN subscribers - load up the VFP 8 environment off their MSDN CD's. There are a ton of free support forums I would be happy to pass on to new users curious about VFP.

Sincerely,
Malcolm Greene
Brooks-Durham Software