Visual FoxPro Developer's Association

by Kristyne McDaniel

I've been developing software using FoxPro and Visual FoxPro since 1992, starting shortly before the Microsoft purchase of Fox Software. It didn't take me any time at all to recognize the great strengths of the language, and to learn to love the speed with which FoxPro accesses data.

VFP is the kind of language that grows on you, grabs hold of you, and won't let you go. I had never felt the same way about C/C++ or Fortran, which I had been working with prior to beginning with VFP.

For nearly two decades, a wide variety of applications were written with FoxPro and Visual FoxPro. Estimates indicate that over 100 million lines of VFP code are still in use by companies all over the world. Perhaps yours is one of them.

At Microsoft, continuing Visual FoxPro development has ended. Support will continue through 2015, at which time existing users will either have converted to some other language, or something in the current Status Quo will have changed. Either way, all those programs and many millions of lines of code will need to be converted, modified, wrapped into DLLs, or in some fashion packaged back up into object code that can continue to be used.

I do not believe old programs ever die. They may wither away or morph into some other form, but somewhere each of those old programs is gripping with its last breath the storage media on which it resides.

To the future!

~ Kristyne McDaniel
McStyles Software