Visual FoxPro 9 SP2 Hotfix Released

Great news! (about time!)

Post by Rick Schummer [MVP]:

Microsoft has released a hotfix to the most serious Report Designer bug in VFP 9 SP2. You can read about the fix in the Microsoft KnowledgeBase article #968409, titled "FIX: The group header of a data grouping is not printed at the top of each page as expected after you install Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0 Service Pack 2". You can read about all the details on Cathy Pountney's and Rick Schummer's blog post on the topic.

Glad to hear it. Thanks Rick for the great news!

Ken Levy joins EPS-Software!

I received the news that Ken Levy joined EPS (read Press Release) to evangelize their line of brands and products. I was late to the news (work has a habit of interfering sometimes) as I see Craig and Andy have already covered it. Good move for the folks at EPS.

Full Justified texts in reports with GdiPlusX

Cesar has a great post with examples, code and screenshots, of how to do reporting in VFPwith text justification using GdiPlusX. Well done!

(Via Foxite)

Ken Murphy's Memorial Page

Eric Den Doop [VFP MVP] has created a beautiful memorial for Ken Murphy who passed away this week.

You can find Ken’s memorial page here:
http://www.foxite.com/memorial/kenmurphy.aspx

Shocked by the news to the VFP community

I am shocked and saddened to learn from Doug that Ken Murphy [VFP MVP] passed away from a heart attack. I met Ken last week at the MVP Summit. An affable guy and very knowledgeable. A sad day for the community.

Craig Bailey shot this picture of Ken and Schnubbs at the 2008 MVP Summit last week.

Back from the MVP Summit

Just came back from Seattle and Redmond where I attended the Microsoft 2008 MVP Summit, and event by invitation where MVPs get together and get to talk to the development teams and Microsoft management.

I had a great time and had the pleasure to meet some old friends and colleagues. One thing I wanted to talk about is how, even though the Fox Team is not there anymore, as their members have moved on to other projects within the company, they still are the Fox Team and came to talk to us and discuss the issues with the Fox. I wanted to write about this but Rick Schummer did an excellent job and put it better that I could.

FoxPro videos on YouTube!

Andrew McNeil found this 1990 promotional video from Fox Software. I had never seen this one before. It surely brings back memories and old faces. Nicely done Andy!

While looking at the offerings in YouTube I also found this short one from our Fox MVP meeting intro in 2007, by Craig Bailey. It turns out I'm in YouTube now! Thanks Craig!

Sedna released!

Microsoft has released the Sedna components for Visual FoxPro. Sedna is a collection of libraries, samples and add-ons to Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP2.

More details in the postings from Craig and Rick.

You can download the add-on components directly from Microsoft.

VFP Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Tamar Granor

I just heard that Tamar Granor was awarded the VFP Lifetime Achievement Award at the Southwest Fox 2007 Conference this past week.

I am very pleased about this, and want to congratulate her as I cannot think of anyone more deserving. Tamar has been a constant advocate for Visual FoxPro, helping users for a very long time. She has been editor of FoxPro Advisor Magazine for years, a conference speaker countless times, and one of the very few continuous Microsoft MVPs receiving the award every year since the program's inception in 1993.

My only regret is that I could not make it to the conference this time to give her congrats in person. Way to go Tamar!

Todd on VFP and SQL Server scripts

Todd McKenna has a good blog post titled Use .sql Files with SQLEXEC for Better Script Management showing how to decouple your middleware code from your database in your data access layer. Namely he shows an example on going from this:

SQLEXEC(lnConnHand,'SELECT * FROM Customer')

to this:

SQLEXEC(lnConnHand,FILETOSTR("c:\sqlserver2005\script1.sql"))

This is a very good idea, similar to using the ExecScript() function in VFP but applying it to SQL Server and getting the queries from script files. Of course, you could use Stored Procedures which are precompiled and optimized in SQL Server but Todd's idea makes for simple decoupling and portability. What you have to watch for (as is also with ExecScript) is security. If you read script files from disk, anybody could change them and supply malicious scripts. One possible answer is to read them from Memo fields instead, where you have a little more security control (but not much unless you encrypt them). In short, they do not replace Stored Procedures for security and speed, but they are very flexible and very handy.

Visual FoxPro SP2 released!

Microsoft released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Visual FoxPro 9.0 yesterday night and it is now available for download!

Milind Lele, Program Manager wrote a short note on the Visual FoxPro page. Thanks Milind for your team's hard work!

Here's a list of fixed bugs. XSOURCE for this release will be coming out soon.

I'm an MVP again!

Microsoft awarded me with the MVP award for the 8th consecutive year. This is an honor and an incentive to try to help the community even harder. The award is given for helping with Visual FoxPro issues, in my case in Forums in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Let me also congratulate the other MVPs that have received the award for this 2007-2008 cycle.

SouthWest Fox 2007 speakers & session schedule announced

The speakers and sessions for the upcoming Southwest Fox 2007 conference (October 18-21, 2007 in Mesa Arizona) have been announced today.

Rick Schummer and Doug Hennig have published info in their respective blogs and Rick's company, White Light Computing has graciously donated a $300 scholarship to one lucky attendee to be applied to attending next year's conference. Way to go Rick!

This looks like it will be an awesome conference! Who says the Fox is dead?

Another good FoxPro article

Another article of Visual FoxPro's announcement, this one quite good, from Redmond Developer.

Microsoft surveys have found that more than half of the VFP customer base has used FoxPro-based products for more than 12 years. Additionally, 60 percent are overseas and 80 percent work in small companies, according to data gathered in 2005.

As the article states there is still a vibrant VFP Developer Community. The tool is still viable, and there is a market for it. The fear from software companies developing in Visual FoxPro is that it will be harder to find good Fox coders in the future as many will be moving to more mainstream development platforms.

Computerworld: FoxPro users petition to keep database language alive

Another good article, this time in Computerworld (by Eric Lai), "FoxPro users petition to keep database language alive", comments about the MasFoxPro (MoreFoxPro) community petition to Microsoft to continue Visual FoxPro development.

Despite a concerted online effort by devoted Visual FoxPro developers, Microsoft Corp. said late last week that it won’t change its plan to halt work on the venerable database programming tool...

Mr. Lai has written the most comprehensive article on the subject to date. Based on my knowledge as part of the community for over 20 years, and also having been present at the MVP meeting when the decision was announced, I'd have to say that the article is mostly accurate and reflects what has been said.

I still think Microsoft has made a final decision, whether the public agrees with it or not. I stated my views on the subject before, and it has not changed. I commend the community for the movement. It is a vibrant community that had stayed with the product for many, many years. I have made lifelong friends and I'm proud to call myself a part of the Foxgang. I continue to think Visual FoxPro is a viable tool for many situations.I use it when called for as I also use other technologies (ex. ASP.NET) when it is best suited for the problem at hand.

The Fox still lives and will continue to work for years to come, even after official support ends by 2015. I also believe the community should know and use other tools to be better software professionals, and to offer a better value to our customers/employers.

Developers petition Microsoft to reconsider FoxPro phase out

Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet blogs about the MasFoxPro grassroots campaign to try to convince Microsoft to continue with Visual FoxPro or otherwise release it as Open Source.

On the heels of Microsoft's acknowledgement that it has no plans to continue development of its Visual FoxPro data-centric programming language, two Spanish Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) have launched a campaign to try to convince Microsoft to reconsider its decision...

I personally did not sign the MasFoxPro letter as I stated my reasons publicly in the UT, mainly that I do not think it will acomplish much other than making some noise. Some people in the community are probably mad at me and I did get some comments and flak at my writings there but I still think it is a done deal and a decision we were strongly hinted at two years ago.

Mind you, SEDNA does go open source and free as I stated (pointing to Microsoft), but the request is for MS to continue updating the core product. I wish them luck in their endeavor though I don't see what it can be done about this.

In the meantime, Visual FoxPro still works and is still a great development platform and language and will continue to be so for years to come.


Link

Photo of the day

The Foxgang at the 2007 MVP Summit (click on link to see who's who)

DBI Tech continues to support Visual FoxPro

DBI Tech announces that they will continue supporting control for VFP and Sedna, in response to Microsoft's announcement that there will be no VFP version 10, which I blogged about here.

That's a great move from a great company (I used their controls for years with great success).

Visual FoxPro Sedna goes Open Source - VFP lives on

As most of you know by now, the Microsoft VFP team announced that Sedna, the next release of extensions to Visual Foxpro 9.0 will be released by the end of Summer (Northern) 2007. The annnoucement also confirms what we in the Fox community knew for a year or more, i.e. that there will be no release of Visual FoxPro 10.

Some people I talked to feel shocked and surprised by this announcement. This shouldn't be so. Look at it this way, FoxPro is a mature product with a great set of features. It does the job well and does it fast. What features could Microsoft add to this great platform that would justify the amount of money they would have to spend to create a new version, test it and release it? There is no set of features that could add that much more value to what we already have.

On the other hand, the very good news in my view, is that Microsoft has agreed to release Sedna and all its extensions as a free product. I'll say it again. Free, at no cost to you whatsoever, ready to download! This, plus all the community enhancements in projects like SednaX (at Codeplex.com) make FoxPro an even greater value.

Yes, VFP 9.0 SP2 is on track to be released later this year (also free). Official Microsoft support runs until 2015. There are thousands and thousands of FoxPro apps running out there, many of them still in old versions like VFP 6.0 or even FP Windows, and yes, FP DOS 2.6! This goes to show you that the Fox will live for many many years to come.

The MVP Program, and FoxPro support forums and newsgroups, let alone blogs, will continue to exist as long as there is a community and a need.

By the time official support expires FoxPro would be 23 years old in Microsoft plus almost 10 years before that, in one form or another! What other piece of commercial software, with the exception maybe of Flight Simulator, has had such a successful run?

Let's rejoice, the Fox will live on for years to come.

Redmond Mag: FoxPro Lives!

Doug Barney at RedmondMag wrote an article praising Visual FoxPro. and mentioning the release of the February CTP of Sedna.

I spent years covering databases for InfoWorld and Computerworld, and perhaps the liveliest market of all was FoxPro. Originally a dBase clone, it grew to outshine the Ashton-Tate tool and was eventually bought by Microsoft.

I even spent a week in Orlando at a FoxPro user group, and boy, those folks were hardcore. Some looked like they hadn't left their keyboard in a decade!

Microsoft tried to kill off FoxPro in favor of both Access and SQL Server, but users never let 'em.

So what is Microsoft to do? Build a brand-new version that's .NET 2.0-compliant and works with Visual Studio. With this kind of tweaking, I'd give FoxPro another 10 years, at least!

It's good to see at least some coverage in the media.