DEVCON keynote shows early Sedna ideas

At the opening keynote session at the Visual FoxPro DevCon in Las Vegas Sunday night, Ken Levy and Randy Brown of the Microsoft Visual FoxPro team showed several early prototypes of features that might be included in the Sedna release in 2007. Ken emphasized throughout the session much of the same information that has been posted publicly so far, including the fact that Sedna will be focused on making Visual FoxPro 9.0 work better with the Longhorn operating system, .NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, and other upcoming technologies.

Although Microsoft says that they will not know until closer to release just how Sedna will be packaged (including what it will be called and what cost will be involved in upgrading a VFP 9.0 system to use the Sedna features), they discussed some bullet points that clarify a little more about the hazy outlines of Sedna.

One way to look at Sedna is to consider it equivalent to a VFP 9.0 SP2 with Add-ons. So, it would be more than a typical service pack, but not necessarily called a new version. However, those marketing decisions will not be made probably for more than a year. What the VFP Team expects Sedna to look like can be summed up like this:

• Limited core product updates


• New and improved XBase components


• .NET wrapper classes for use with VFP


• Additional product DLLs for extensibility

In addition to posting the Roadmap recently, Microsoft intends to release Sedna details regularly during development and also post public beta Sedna components online on a regular basis. The VFP team has its budget for the Sedna project and it getting its personnel in place to move ahead with the project. As often happens between product releases, there are some changes in personnel, but Alan Griver mentioned that two people will be joining the team very soon.

Randy showed a cool demo that Calvin Hsia had worked on recently, that hooked into Windows Explorer to call a DLL that calls back into VFP to dynamically generate information that was then displayed in the Explorer interface. For example, by clicking on a "virtual folder" in the left-hand treeview and clicking on a DBC filename, the right-hand Explorer pane then displayed a list of all files in the project. Clicking on a Table name magically showed the fields and data types in the right-hand pane. That's the type of "add-ins" that may make up some of the new features of Sedna, using DLLs coded in C that can hook VFP and other technologies together.

They also showed a Fox Feeds utility that read RSS from various blogs and pulled the information into folders in Outlook. Here is a blog entry from Calvin that explains more about Shell Namespace Extensions, which are being used for some of these demos. You also may want to keep an eye on a blog that Randy has started, called the Fox Team Sedna Blog.

Ken showed a few early examples of calling wrapper classes that made it easy to talk from VFP to the .NET framework, including calling Web Services via .NET instead of using the SOAP Toolkit, and calling an XML tranform via .NET, taking advantage of compiled XLST in .NET 2.0. He showed clicking on a button in VFP to bring up a .NET Winform. He also did the same with an Avalon form and showed how VFP could change the XAML for an Avalon form to change the visual appearance of the form. However, there will likely not be complete control of Avalon from VFP in terms of the underlying code-behind that works with the XAML-generated visual layout of the form. Much more is to be researched on these possibilities over the next year, so it's too early to tell yet just how useful this feature will be. Richard Stanton of the VFP team is regularly working with the Avalon team to see what can be done in this area.

Another interesting thing demonstrated during the session was related to the upcoming "Click Once" technology that will arrive with Visual Studio 2005. By registering a VFP COM object in a .NET project and setting the COM object wrapper's "Isolated" property to true, you get the VFP COM object encapsulated inside the .NET project and when deployed, it will not make any changes to the user's computer registry, depending instead on the DLL information contained in the project manifest file. This is a very cool capability for more easily deploying .NET applications that work with VFP COM Interop and will make this scenario much more pleasant.

Ken also showed a "My" class that is designed to work similarly as the new My namespace in VB.NET. This type of new functionality will be driven from a table, much as Intellisense is done in VFP. After instantiating the "My" object, you can then drill down into My.Computer, My.User, My.Data, My.Multimedia, and multiple levels within each of those. This will provide "shortcuts" to simplify common tasks and will be extensible in the usual Fox tradition.

New additions to the Report Designer are coming, which will enable many of the new features of dynamic formatting of report data that can now be accomplished via specially coded report listener classes. The new designer features will provide dialogs to set up dynamic expression evaluation to control which report items are bold, italic, underlined, and colored in various ways, all without writing any report listener code.

So, what will Sedna really end up looking like when it's finally complete in approximately two years? It's too early to say. However, several members of the VFP team stated in informal discussion after the keynote that the huge list of features that made it into VFP 9.0 was not really expected in the early planning stages for that product. As design and development of VFP 9.0 progressed, more and more features were added, making it a very significant release. Microsoft's Alan Griver emphasized that the VFP team will approach the Sedna project with just as much energy and enthusiasm.

My personal opinion? Two years is along time for the VFP team, and as they tackle this project with community involvement, we may all be surprised at what eventually emerges. What the team most needs right now from the community are detailed scenarios of what kind of development projects need more interoperability help from the Sedna release. Think about it, join the discussions online, and let Microsoft know what you want them to put into Sedna.

This is not all the news, but it's all I can do for tonight. Check Alex Feldstein's blog for his report, which he is frantically typing away on just a few feet away from me in the conference computer area. Craig's FoxBlog will also probably have some analysis sometime in the next day or two.

I'll post more analysis either Monday or Tuesday, after talking with attendees, Microsoft personnel, and VFP community leaders.