Why Visual FoxPro?

Why pay more money than you need to for your custom application? Visual FoxPro has a proven track record for rapid application development that will save you as much as 90% of your custom software development costs.

Leveraging the language features

Because the Visual FoxPro language itself includes specialized features for accessing, handling, and processing data, it is simply faster than most other tools for processing data. Commonly accepted code ratios for other languages are shown here:

Latest technologies

The latest technologies from Microsoft and others have a lot of promise. The application or module we develop for you with Visual FoxPro has a bright future as well. Just as SQL Server cooperates well with the newest .NET technologies, the latest versions of Visual FoxPro fits right in too.

Features that should not be done with pure Visual FoxPro can be done using purchased tools or custom-designed with Visual C++. The same ActiveX controls that are used with Visual Basic, C# or C++ can be used to advantage with a Visual FoxPro application -- without having to give up the blinding data processing speed that comes natively with Visual FoxPro.

Free from the CLR

As with SQL Server, Visual FoxPro is not included in the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). At first glance, this might not seem like a good thing. However, if VFP were to become a participant with the CLR, it would lose many of the language features that make it so useful. It was a long discussion and a difficult decision, but in the end the Visual FoxPro developer community made the decision to stay out of the CLR

 — and with that move to keep the features that make VFP such a powerful tool.

Independent updates

In fact, Visual FoxPro itself was recently removed from the Visual Studio developer tool suite by the request of the Visual FoxPro developer community.

What we buy with this strategic move is the ability of the Fox team at Microsoft to release updates as they are available, independently of the schedule for the other tools in the suite. This has made updates more readily available than they had been in the past. For a view of past updates, take a look at the Visual FoxPro downloads page.

New Versions

Newer versions of Visual FoxPro are in the pipeline right now. Version 8 was just released to manufacturing on 1/31/2003, and is now available for download through MSDN. Microsoft has indicated that it expects this new version to be widely available as a separate shrink-wrapped package on 12-March-2003. Version 9 is in development. Microsoft's support has been much better than originally expected; the continuing new versions and newest features currently on the design board attest to that.

The length of time that support will be available for the various versions of Microsoft's entire product line has been spelled out and posted on their web site. The announced dates for support of each released version of Visual FoxPro can be found on Microsoft's Product Lifecycle Dates web page.

We are committed to using the most reliable techniques we know, and the most recent versions of software available for all new development.

Operating System Support for Development and Runtime

The latest version of Visual FoxPro is intended for use on the Windows 2000 and higher operating systems. Your compiled code already runs on Win98 and higher systems, but the developer version's installer doesn't let you do it directly. However, you can install the developer environment for VFP8 on Windows 98. Here's how.

This page was last modified on Tuesday, 07 November 2006