Mar
06
The Fox Community once again has two magazines devoted to VFP content! Over on the UniversalThread Martin Salias announced that Mike Yearwood is taking over as editor of the UT Magazine. This magazine will be published quarterly and targeted towards Visual FoxPro developers. Looks like they want to write about the VFP Compiler, Guineu, new versions of Web Connection, Sedna, the VFPX projects, and the upcoming VFP Studio. More details to come later.
You will find the “Universal Thread Magazine will be back!” thread in the Chatter section so those who avoid Chatter might miss this announcement.
The good news just keeps on coming!
Tod,I don’t think the 64-bit is an excuse as much as it is their resoan for moving forward. Look, they dumped FrontPage to recreate Express. VB 6 into VB.Net. VB 6 is never going to be 64-bit either.I think your points about FoxPro’s appeal are very valid but if your resoan for not jumping to C# is Rushmore with Native DBF support, then I think you’ve shown why they would never do it.They want developers to embrace the LINQ model, SQL server DOES have rushmore technology now, so you’ve got an OLE DB provider to give you DBF support, LINQ to give you data access and now what is there to keep you in Visual FoxPro and not in C#?My answer would be the overall architecture of the IDE. The entire hack it yourself approach, while yes, you can do it in Microsoft’s newer environments, they just don’t feel the same. I know that sounds fairly vague or sentimental but I think it’s a valid statement. Vista (or its server successor Longhorn) is Microsoft’s last 64-bit OS after that, they will be rebuilding (yet again). If they could recreate FoxPro in a 64-bit IDE offering but with native DBF support (as well as SQL, etc), would that be the solution? Well, Microsoft wants their languages to be VB or C#. You want something else? Build it yourself. Someone mentioned something to me about a possible VFP-syntax like addition to the CLR. Then you work in the Visual Studio IDE (which Microsoft wants) but have your own language. (The FoxPro DotNet toolkit was one not sure if there’s another initiative)Would that answer the demands of VFP developers world-wide? Sadly, I don’t think it would. Just my two cents.