Comments on: FoxPro: What does the name mean to customers?

By: It’s So Gray: Introduction | Kevin Ragsdale

It’s So Gray: Introduction | Kevin Ragsdale — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 22:38:44 +0000

[...] to notice a common theme in the Fox blogosphere. People were talking about how much their clients hated THE FoxPro, and a few bloggers (namely, the Craig’s – Bailey and Boyd), began talking about how we, as Fox [...]

By: Shawn White

Shawn White — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 14:21:14 +0000

Hi Rick, I agree with you. I also am aware that the fox branding can be disabled – though many legacy apps have not done this. I am proud to work in VFP, I didn’t intend to imply otherwise. I was just trying to say that a crash is not the best moment to inform your users what language you use. Historically (perhaps not now) this has been one of the reasons why users think that their custom application (the one they hate) is synonymous with VFP as a whole.

By: Rick Schummer

Rick Schummer — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 01:40:44 +0000

Shawn, "Cannot Quit Visual FoxPro" can be removed simply using ON SHUTDOWN. My users have never seen this and I doubt my clients would know VFP 9 is under the hood if I did not tell them. It is not something I hide from my clients and it is not something I am ashamed of, or something I have to fight over with my customers.

I am proud to tell my clients that their app is powered by VFP. It just cracks me up when they refer to the app as FoxPro instead of the application name.

Thinking about "VFP" text showing in one of my custom apps...I believe the last built in item I remember seeing was the "Visual FoxPro" in the report spooler when printing a report. I think the Fox Team removed this in VFP 7.

If you have specific examples share them with Microsoft. I am sure they would be interested in correcting any oversights.

By: Shawn White

Shawn White — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 16:13:48 +0000

I have spent the last few years building commercial software, not consulting for IT departments so I had almost blocked this phenomena from my mind.

Your blog made me cringe. I too have encountered the dreaded “The FoxPro app” syndrome. I believe one cause (at least a contributing cause) is that the last thing you often see when a foxpro app crashes is “Cannot Quit Visual Foxpro”. I am not sure why the Fox engineers feel a need to advertise that an App was written in VFP at the applications worst moment. I don’t recall ever seeing a similar message for VB or Delphi – though I have seen C++ advertise its runtime errors. Most people have no clue when an app was written in C++, Delphi, VB etc. In foxpro the brand name whether in a caption, a msgbox, or the fox icon, somehow ends up getting displayed to the user, forever linking VFP with a bad user experience.

Three years ago one of my clients (a multi-millionaire from his fox 2.5 app) was cursing up a storm at a bug he was encountering in his app – foxpro sucks etc. I asked him if he could travel back in time 16 years what would he have used instead? He didn’t have an answer.

Foxpro is a victim of its own success. I personally know of at least three multi-million dollar companies that run their entire business on 15 year old fox 2.5 dos apps. You don’t see many 10 year old VB programs still running in production. When the fox apps start to encounter issues from running in Windows XP or because they have hit their data limit, rather than migrate the app to VFP/MySQL the developers come up with some ridiculously convoluted table structure. Evidently FoxPro is to blame – not the sloppy developer.

By: k.i.v.

k.i.v. — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 18:23:54 +0000

My situation is almost exactly as you describe. I’m sick of it…