Where have you gone, Visual FoxPro? (Article: David Worthington)

From SDTimes:

Indeed, the FoxPro community remains engaged, as evidenced by activity on CodePlex, Microsoft’s primary Web site for Shared Source projects.

“It has added around 15 new capabilities to VFP in just the last year-and-a-half,” said Griver. “They localized VFP into multiple languages, and have done more work to integrate it into [Visual Studio] Team Foundation Server. It’s a pretty amazing thing.”

“There were always rumors that [Microsoft] would kill it off; the community said, ‘Just give it to us,’ and it looks like [the community process works]. It’s kind of cool,” said Homnick.

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According to Griver, Visual Studio’s data tools are rooted in VFP, and in a similar fashion, LINQ (Language Integrated Query) “owes a debt” to FoxPro by building on some of its remote view data query capabilities. “When you create something new, it is created from an amalgam of what has come before,” he said.

Duffy agreed, saying, “When [Microsoft] first showed us LINQ, it was kind of like, ‘Yeah, we’ve had that in FoxPro for a long time, what’s new here?’

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What’s old is often new again. Like dBASE, FoxPro was used to create applications departmentally—often without IT’s knowledge. Today, service-oriented architectures emphasize service reuse, while enterprise mashups empower business users to create their own governed applications out of services—again, without IT’s blessing.

“The industry goes in circles,” Griver remarked. But the circle may be collapsing into a dot.