The Future of Foxpro (Article: Chad Hower, April 2, 2007)

From CIO:

I vividly remember what it was like to be in that position and I understand many FoxPro devotees are understandably upset. But logically, not only did the end of life for FoxPro make sense, but everyone, including the FoxPro followers knew that this was coming, regardless of what Microsoft did or did not say. When I mentioned this fact to some colleagues, the near-universal response was "What?! You mean FoxPro was still around?"

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In addition, many FoxPro to .NET conversion consultancies have been around for several years. Quite bluntly, the FoxPro developers who were surprised by this announcement have had their heads in the sand.

Microsoft has not only been moving away from native development (C++ aside) and focusing on managed code, but centralizing all development tools around Visual Studio. Gone are the days of maintaining and supporting dozens of separate specialized development environments.

To bring FoxPro into this fold would require FoxPro to be brought to .NET properly and for it to become part of Visual Studio. Either step would have drastically changed FoxPro in ways that would make the VB to VB.NET change look small in comparison. The end result may have shared a name with FoxPro, but it certainly would not be a FoxPro the FoxPro developers would recognize, and it certainly would not run existing FoxPro applications without massive changes.

While FoxPro certainly has some unique features, most of them are now or soon available in .NET. Projects like LINQ continue to reduce the unique advantages of FoxPro, and taken in conjunction with the advantages of .NET, a move to .NET is the natural evolution.

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There is no reason to panic if you are a FoxPro developer or if you have FoxPro applications. I would strongly recommend against new applications in FoxPro for obvious reasons, but existing applications are not going to expire tomorrow.

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Some may blame Microsoft for dropping yet another product, but in reality it was the market and evolution that passed FoxPro by. Microsoft only did what was obvious and everyone but the devoted could see was coming.

From the comments:

This is how I see it: I have been developing web databases with Visual FoxPro for over 10 years, and when PHP or .NET programmers occasionally want to show me how much better their stuff is, they are always SHOCKED when they realize how much WORSE it is.

They typically need 3 to 10 times the code, sometimes over 20 times the code, to get business applications done. By the time they have instantiated their objects, I am finished with the business logic and application.

Furthermore, FoxPRO's built-in database is highly optimized and runs typically 5-10 times faster than SQLServer or MySQL in Web applications, no result sets need to be communicated, no SQL strings need to be parsed.

This is the ONLY problem I see: Although Visual FoxPRO is the most bugfree programming language around, it does not make Microsoft much money. It does NOT require SQL Server License fees, third-party components, additional language components, and typically much smaller developer teams.

FoxPRO was always the renegade product in the company, it's almost as if Microsoft was ALSO giving away MySQL to any potential SQLServer customer. "OBVIOUSLY that had to end".

BUT the XBASE community will not die because of the End-Of-Life notice, quite to the contrary. In the past FOXPRO was always the most powerful and best product in the XBASE community, and it was not profitable for anyone's XBASE to compete against Microsoft's product. With Microsoft leaving the competition, the XBASE competition will THRIVE, and companies like dBASE Inc, Recital, FlagShip, Harbor Project etc. will see a whole new reason for existence: hundreds of thousands of programmers coming.

The 25-year old dBASEII advertising "Boy Is This Costing You!" (referring to inefficient BASIC programming) is more true than ever before: XBASE code is perfect for web databases, because it deals directly with data instead of all these .NET and PHP memory variables, objects, procedure calls, etc. etc.

FoxPRO may see the End Of Life in another 10 years or so, but XBASE will continue to grow. I should probably do some actual code demonstrations that show how much better it works and plan to do so.