Microsoft Visual FoxPro

» see msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i missed visual foxpro at the language level. it never came up in any computer engineering course i sat through in the early 2000s, and by the time i was writing real code for money the data layer was already postgres or sql server with whatever modern language on top. but vfp was in the building. it was the stack i kept seeing in old turkish small-business apps, the cash-register software at a neighborhood market, the patient-record program a private clinic ran on a single windows xp machine in the back office.

fox software started in perrysburg ohio in 1984. foxbase was a dbase clone with a faster query engine. foxpro followed. by 1992 microsoft had bought fox technologies whole and rebranded the line as visual foxpro starting with version 3.0 in 1995. tightly coupled language plus engine, no separate sql server needed, gui builder included. for a one-person shop writing a windows lob app in 1998, it was a complete tool in a single shrinkwrap.

microsoft kept shipping vfp through the early 2000s. version 9.0 in december 2004 was the last major release. then on the thirteenth of march 2007 microsoft announced there would be no vfp10. mainstream support ran out in january 2010, extended in january 2015. service pack 2 for 9.0 shipped in october 2007 as a parting gift.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

vfp's place in the microsoft portfolio was awkward from day one of the acquisition. the company already had access for the desktop database tier and sql server for the enterprise. fox was the third option that did not fit either column, and the.NET launch in 2002 made the misfit obvious. visual basic 6 was given the.NET path to vb.net. vfp was given nothing.

the developer community ran on it anyway. a vfp app could ship as a single executable plus a few dbf files, no install of sql server, no runtime setup beyond the supplied dlls. for a developer building line-of-business windows software for a turkish dentist's office or a brazilian municipal department or a russian school district, that was a real shipping advantage.

~ the day it died ~

the march 2007 post on the vfp team blog made it official: no version 10, no managed-code follow-up. microsoft offered the sedna toolkit as a final value-add and pointed users at visual studio plus sql server going forward. the vfp team was dispersed inside microsoft. the language went into deep maintenance for eight more years until extended support ran out.

~ what got buried with it ~

the xBase lineage. dbase iii had been the canonical pc database language of the mid 80s. foxpro extended it. clipper compiled it. vfp was the last commercial xBase that mattered. when microsoft retired vfp the whole family lost its biggest vendor and never got another one. the apps written in it are still running in back offices and clinics around the world, talking to dbf files that look the same as they did in 1987.

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