Today, Ken Levy from Microsoft Redmond presented the features of
Visual
FoxPro 8 here in Zurich. I used to be a DBase developer but lost track of the
DBase-, Clipper-, FoxPro-world after switching to Access, VB and Smalltalk in the
mid 90ies. I was quite amazed about what Visual FoxPro is capable of doing, especially
in the interoperability space.
The new FoxPro can work with SQL, DBF (it's own database format) or XML as data source
and web services can be consumed or published from FoxPro. If a middle-tier component
is written in FoxPro, it can be published as COM component which can then be exposed
to the .NET framework using a wrapper class. Therefore, ASP.NET can be used as web-frontend
for FoxPro solutions (which by itself does not offer web-frontend-programming).
There is a team-site on GotDotNet about Visual
FoxPro integration with Visual Studio .NET. Some of the interesting bits up there
are code samples that show how to interact between the two worlds:
and the fact that there is a "Visual
FoxPro Toolkit for .NET" (including source
code), a fully managed library (no wrappers) that makes over 225 Visual FoxPro
functions available to the .NET framework programmer. Very cool if you are switching
from FoxPro to any .NET language and are missing your favorite functions. It all is
packed into a 57k (!) managed library plus documentation.
Ken also pointed out some very interesting features of the next version of FoxPro,
codenamed "Europa". Much of the comfort of Visual Studio .NET is coming the FoxPro
programmers way.
