On Announcement (Blog: Dave Aring)

Denial Isn't Just a River in Egypt

From the blog:

The news came as a surprise to many of the developers in the FoxPro community, but those developers must have been in denial or had their heads buried in the Hentzenwerke “Hacker’s Guide” because the handwriting has been on the wall for months. Years! Decades?

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Nevertheless, the fact is that Microsoft is going to support Visual FoxPro only through 2015, so there is no sense in denying it any longer. VFP is on its own.

Notice and this is very important, I did NOT say that VFP is DEAD. I just said it is on its own. Why? Because 2015 is eight years away. Who knows what will happen by then? I, personally, am still maintaining applications written in the mid 1990s that the clients love and couldn’t do without. I expect to see applications, being written today, around for another twenty years. The applications do EXACTLY (another key word) what the client wants them to do and they have no plans of abandoning them. Isn’t that the bottom line? So, if you are in need of custom applications and plan on being in business for the next 20-25 years, there is no compelling reason why you shouldn’t consider (or at the very least, do not summarily dismiss) having those applications written in Visual FoxPro. An honest, ethical developer should offer you all options, explain the pros and cons of each, and then help you to decide upon the approach that is best for you.

From the comments:

Notice how your reference for greatness in your post is all about the bygone era of the pre .COM bubble? Nothing past that to beat the drum with?

Response from Dave:

...my whole point was to emphasize how the applications I alluded to were developed in the past and, TODAY, are still viable. Then, extrapolating that fact, I feel we can safely ASSume that applications being developed today will still be running for many years (maybe 10-20).