Major VFP News from Redmond - Good and Bad (Sad)
Alan Griver (YAG) and the Microsoft Visual FoxPro Team announced to VFP MVPs tonight at the MVP Summit several news items related to the future of VFP. There is good news and there is sad news.
1) It's now official -- there will be no VFP 10. This has been known pretty well for some time by all but the most stubbornly optimistic among us, but had never been officially stated by Microsoft. Today it is official.
2) Service Pack 2 (SP2) for VFP9 will be released by the end of Summer, 2007, with a goal of working through as many bugs as possible between now and then. Special focus is on VISTA compatibility and the team needs feedback right away from anyone encountering bugs running VFP9 apps on VISTA.
3) The SEDNA project (the official Microsoft release of VFP9 add-ons) will also be released by the end of Summer, 2007, and it will be FREE! Earlier discussions had hinted that Microsoft might charge for Sedna, but it will instead be available as a free download.
4) The SEDNA project will be released to the community as an open source project, meaning that all of the code included in it will be available for maintenance and enhancement by the community via projects to be set up on CodePlex, the site of the VFPX open source project. Details will be released later about how the SEDNA projects will be managed on CodePlex, but regardless of any future development, you will still be able to download the initial, official Microsoft release of SEDNA as a baseline that will be supported by Microsoft along with VFP9 until 2015.
5) As previously stated, VFP9 will be supported until 2010 in normal support mode and until 2015 in extended support mode. VFP9 will continue to be available as a standalone product for several more years, but the exact date of its discontinuance as a product will be announced at a later date. However, VFP9 will continue to be available in MSDN Subscriptions until the extended support runs out in 2015.
6) The VFP MVP program will continue, so the community will benefit from MVPs with VFP as a specialty.
YAG spent a good part of the day talking with various representatives of the press before meeting with MVPs at a 5pm VFP Team Meeting to explain the news being announced today. YAG's blog contains the only official announcement so far, although the news will appear on the Microsoft VFP site very soon.
Mary Jo Foley, who has written many articles about VFP and Sedna, has written about today's announcement on her blog ("Microsoft to release FoxPro ‘Sedna’ as Shared Source"), emphasizing the open source aspect of the story.
For many of us in the room tonight, it was a bittersweet moment -- being there with VFP team members who are just like family to us and sharing with them some laughs, and also sharing a sense of sadness at the impending end of an era. Sure, VFP support from Microsoft will go on, and the community will continue to support the product, but the finality of no new release from Microsoft beyond SP2 and Sedna is a truly sad moment.
Still, it's extraordinary that the product has morphed and wiggled its way to release after release over the years -- spanning well over a decade under Microsoft's support. That's a long time for any software product. And the the fact that Sedna is being released to the community as a FREE download and also as open source is very good news for every VFP user!
We asked some questions about the VFP Team and their responsibilities, and here's the scoop. The core team and testing team and working hard on SP2 and Sedna from now through release, but by the end of the summer, they will be moving on to other projects for the bulk of their time. There will still be a VFP "alias" for email circulation internally at Microsoft so that if Support Services identify a critical bug that cannot be worked around, the issue can be escalated internally via the email alias and those with VFP C++ experience (namely Calvin Hsia, Aleksey Tsingauz and Richard Stanton) can handle the issues that are escalated up from Support Services.
All three of the core coders named above are already working part-time on various aspects of the VB.NET implementation of the ground-breaking Language Integrated Query (LINQ) feature of the Visual Studio "Orcas" release, and they will likely continue those involvements when the VFP release cycle winds down later this year. Their years of experience working with the integrated data language in VFP will help to make VB.NET's LINQ integration spectacular and very compelling for VFP coders who decide to add .NET to their toolkits.
To all the VFP team members, both present and past: Thanks for all you have done to deliver such a fabulous development product to us year after year. You are all awesome!
Now, back to work. I've got several VFP9 projects underway at the moment, and I expect that to be the case for years to come.
1) It's now official -- there will be no VFP 10. This has been known pretty well for some time by all but the most stubbornly optimistic among us, but had never been officially stated by Microsoft. Today it is official.
2) Service Pack 2 (SP2) for VFP9 will be released by the end of Summer, 2007, with a goal of working through as many bugs as possible between now and then. Special focus is on VISTA compatibility and the team needs feedback right away from anyone encountering bugs running VFP9 apps on VISTA.
3) The SEDNA project (the official Microsoft release of VFP9 add-ons) will also be released by the end of Summer, 2007, and it will be FREE! Earlier discussions had hinted that Microsoft might charge for Sedna, but it will instead be available as a free download.
4) The SEDNA project will be released to the community as an open source project, meaning that all of the code included in it will be available for maintenance and enhancement by the community via projects to be set up on CodePlex, the site of the VFPX open source project. Details will be released later about how the SEDNA projects will be managed on CodePlex, but regardless of any future development, you will still be able to download the initial, official Microsoft release of SEDNA as a baseline that will be supported by Microsoft along with VFP9 until 2015.
5) As previously stated, VFP9 will be supported until 2010 in normal support mode and until 2015 in extended support mode. VFP9 will continue to be available as a standalone product for several more years, but the exact date of its discontinuance as a product will be announced at a later date. However, VFP9 will continue to be available in MSDN Subscriptions until the extended support runs out in 2015.
6) The VFP MVP program will continue, so the community will benefit from MVPs with VFP as a specialty.
YAG spent a good part of the day talking with various representatives of the press before meeting with MVPs at a 5pm VFP Team Meeting to explain the news being announced today. YAG's blog contains the only official announcement so far, although the news will appear on the Microsoft VFP site very soon.
Mary Jo Foley, who has written many articles about VFP and Sedna, has written about today's announcement on her blog ("Microsoft to release FoxPro ‘Sedna’ as Shared Source"), emphasizing the open source aspect of the story.
For many of us in the room tonight, it was a bittersweet moment -- being there with VFP team members who are just like family to us and sharing with them some laughs, and also sharing a sense of sadness at the impending end of an era. Sure, VFP support from Microsoft will go on, and the community will continue to support the product, but the finality of no new release from Microsoft beyond SP2 and Sedna is a truly sad moment.
Still, it's extraordinary that the product has morphed and wiggled its way to release after release over the years -- spanning well over a decade under Microsoft's support. That's a long time for any software product. And the the fact that Sedna is being released to the community as a FREE download and also as open source is very good news for every VFP user!
We asked some questions about the VFP Team and their responsibilities, and here's the scoop. The core team and testing team and working hard on SP2 and Sedna from now through release, but by the end of the summer, they will be moving on to other projects for the bulk of their time. There will still be a VFP "alias" for email circulation internally at Microsoft so that if Support Services identify a critical bug that cannot be worked around, the issue can be escalated internally via the email alias and those with VFP C++ experience (namely Calvin Hsia, Aleksey Tsingauz and Richard Stanton) can handle the issues that are escalated up from Support Services.
All three of the core coders named above are already working part-time on various aspects of the VB.NET implementation of the ground-breaking Language Integrated Query (LINQ) feature of the Visual Studio "Orcas" release, and they will likely continue those involvements when the VFP release cycle winds down later this year. Their years of experience working with the integrated data language in VFP will help to make VB.NET's LINQ integration spectacular and very compelling for VFP coders who decide to add .NET to their toolkits.
To all the VFP team members, both present and past: Thanks for all you have done to deliver such a fabulous development product to us year after year. You are all awesome!
Now, back to work. I've got several VFP9 projects underway at the moment, and I expect that to be the case for years to come.
posted by David Stevenson at 10:33 PM
1 Comments:
There is nothing good about MSFT discontinuing support for VFP. Have you really tried to work with .BLOAT this product is a JOKE!
To make my case:
1) The OOP implementation used by the smart tag controls mixes programming code that should be in the business tier into the interface layer in the code behind.
2) The debugger is missing from SQL Server. Yeah you can debug SP from .NET if you can get the setup correct and have a ton of luck.
3) Unless you are performing very basic tasks stored procedure functions performance is horrible. Therefore you have duplicate code in your stored procedure.
4) In .BLOAT design a business tier with a data reader object and pass it to the front end to consume. That works well except the front end has to close the data reader created in the middle tier. Again not exactly great OOP principles.
5) Say you have a stored procedure which you want to perform against an entire dataset that requires input parameters.
Common sense would dictate a syntax such as exec mysp (select field1, field2 from mytable) would do the trick ...
Sorry guess what have to use cursor and fetch which is slow and requires a ton of code.
6) In a select statement the field list and group by clause have to match identically, a sql standard right ... well try getting the unique identifier for the row returned by the group by clause.
When do you ever design a report that just had a sum, min or max field. It is a royal pain ... In vfp just change the set enginebehavior.
7) People all excited because ling is supporting a skip clause give me a break that has been in foxpro since the beginning. what is the next coolest feature they are putting into ling SCAN FOR logic.
8) The class designer is all smoke and mirror in VS 2008 ... Where is the visual inheritance of controls? Missing ... Try to tie two classes together in the designer, cant be done need to code it out. The class designer sure has a sharp UI however too bad it functionally blows.
9) Object Security. It does not exist in VS 2008 even if you implement private classes you can just use c# reflection to get at the inner workings of the class. WOW bet no one would figure that out.
10) Object firing order in vs 2008 controls. In VFP events and methods fired in a predictable manner. Just take a list box control in VS.BLOAT and try to determine the event firing sequence it is eratic as best.
11) MVC is supposed to be a big enhancement for VS 2008 only one problem the framework didn't ship. Beside the fact, why must MSFT develop a new programming paradigm every freaking release of .BLOAT. Perhaps if they did it right the first time we would not have a new one stuffed down our throat.
12) MSFT couldn't get ASP forms to be response and eliminate the refresh so instead of fixing the issue they create yet another tool AJAX.
I could go on but you get my point ... I'm sick and tired of people cheerleading MSFT for crap development tools. If MSFT killed off VFP and a suitable replacement development environment existed I would not have a problem with their decision. But basic tasks I can do in foxpro for DOS is freaking missing from .BLOAT. .BLOAT is far from mature and is NOT by any stretch of the imagination data centric and people are applauding MSFT'S decision, this is ridiculous. Instead of wasting time on language such as f# or silverlight they should have incorporated VFP data functionality into VB.NET or ported the language into .BLOAT before killing the product. People make their living writing data application and NOW MSFT does not have a single data centric language I dont get it ...
When are people going to tell MSFT we are tired of this crap !!!
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