I work with other developers at my clients and mentor several developers on a regular basis. It is not unusual for developers to ask me the question “When was that added to VFP?” I am finding it harder and harder to recall the details off the top of my head with so many versions of VFP.
This morning over on FoxForum a developer who is getting back into VFP development wanted to find out how he could go through a history of VFP to see what new features were added since VFP 6. Naturally I wanted to answer this information is in the VFP Help file in the What’s New section, but he last developed in VFP 6 and now owns a copy of VFP 9, so access to the 7 and 8 Help files is not on his machine.
Then I recalled the VFP Help files are online on the Microsoft MSDN site. Each version has a separate page:
What’s New in VFP 9
What’s New in VFP 8
What’s New in VFP 7
What’s New in VFP 6 (not found)
What’s New in VFP 5
This is a great way for developers who skipped upgrading to each version to find out all the features which are new to them. Unfortunately I could not find what’s new in 6, but I am guessing it is out there.
The definitive guide for me is the Hacker’s Guide to Visual FoxPro 6 and Hacker’s Guide to Visual FoxPro 7, but unfortunately there is no 8 or 9 in this series. I am also a fan of the What’s New in VFP 7, 8, and 9 as well. I use these books along with the Help files to understand which versions of VFP I can support for the developers tools I have published. I find it easier to look up a command in the various resources than to find it breaks when I perform system testing for the developer tool in each version of VFP I plan to support.
Thanks, Rick, it’s nice to have all of these references in one place. And if you really want to jump in the wayback machine, there’s also Differences Between FoxPro and Visual FoxPro at support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;129976.