Posted By: The Channel 9 Team | Jun 17th, 2005 @ 1:12 PM | 64,909 Views | 31 Comments
Ken Levy, Visual Studio and FoxPro product manager, takes us through the latest Visual FoxPro 9 roadmap and gives us some of his trademark cool demos of how a future version of Visual FoxPro will interoperate with Visual Studio.
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Kick *ss! Smiley

I met Ken at a number of Los Angeles user groups back in the early 3.0 and 5.0 days when he was at JPL I think and working on the genscrnX stuff.

VFP has come a LOOOONG way, baby! Smiley

--bruce
Andre Da Costa
Andre Da Costa
Created with PhotoDraw 2000 V2

Does Ken use FireFox as his default web browser? Wink

Tyler Brown
Tyler Brown
Bullets change governments far surer than votes.
Selling a product in a DVD case isn't that bad. As long as it's shrink wrapped, it seems to me that it would be better in many ways. For one, the DVD case would take up less space. Whats the use of having such a huge box when you don't even come close to using the volume of the box?
rhm
rhm
FoxPro is only for existing FoxPro users anyway. Nobody is going to switch to it from SQL Server. Actually I'm pretty amazed MS is still developing it, it must still have a pretty big user-base (databases are like Cobol, pretty hard to get rid of).

Anyway, I like the way Ken is doing all these random demos and Scoble is like: yeh, that's cool in a not-quite-sure-what-the-point-is tone of voice. Then Ken generates some RSS and he livens up totally "THAT'S AWESOME DUDE!" (I added the dude bit but you get the picture).
Andre Da Costa
Andre Da Costa
Created with PhotoDraw 2000 V2
rhm wrote:
FoxPro is only for existing FoxPro users anyway. Nobody is going to switch to it from SQL Server. Actually I'm pretty amazed MS is still developing it, it must still have a pretty big user-base (databases are like Cobol, pretty hard to get rid of).

Anyway, I like the way Ken is doing all these random demos and Scoble is like: yeh, that's cool in a not-quite-sure-what-the-point-is tone of voice. Then Ken generates some RSS and he livens up totally "THAT'S AWESOME DUDE!" (I added the dude bit but you get the picture).


You sensed that too! I understand what Ken is bringing across the relevance of FoxPro with continued evolution of Microsoft's other developer products such as Visual Studio 2005, XAML, Avalon and how it will still have meaning in the Longhorn time frame.

As for packaging, it doesn't really make much sense anymore, we are not living in 1989 or 1993 when products once came with 10 huge manuals weighing up to 30 pounds. With the plethora of online resources and documentation that comes bundled on the CD-ROM or DVD, not to mention things like the web and newsgroups, the paper manual I think has done its days.

I wasn't that welcoming of the DVD style packaging at first, but it really has grown on me. For Office 2003 though, its horrendous, I hope they add more value to the online documentation its really miserable, an Office Help & Support Center similar to Windows XPs H&S would be nice.
CRPietschmann
CRPietschmann
Chris Pietschmann
I would love if all my software came in a normal DVD case.
There are a number of reasons:
1. Less packaging waste
2. Wouldn't need to put the box on my shelf with my books
2. Would be smaller
3. Would be easier to store on a DVD rack just like all the movies and video games (PS2 and Gamecube; I don't have an XBox) I have.
gue
gue
>>I don't like Fox Pro, if Microsoft doesn't care enough to ship it in a real packaged box instead of a 50cents dvd case, I will not buy it. I'll stick with SQL server. when they ship Longhorn or VS  in a dvd case I'll laugh because it shows me how they market a product<<

Seems you didn´t even realize that Ken had VS 2005 to the left of VFP, packaged alike. <g> Trying not to insult you I call this an interesting attitude. Wanna buy lotsa (hot) air?!
What other life-threatening problems do you have?
G
Andre Da Costa
Andre Da Costa
Created with PhotoDraw 2000 V2
Then get a Tablet PC! I understand, there is natural feeling about reading the manual that the monitor is not able to achieve. But it will happen very as Tablets get much thinner and become are more common part of the every work and computing experience.
FoxPro is only for existing FoxPro users anyway. Nobody is going to switch to it from SQL Server. Actually I'm pretty amazed MS is still developing it, it must still have a pretty big user-base (databases are like Cobol, pretty hard to get rid of).

Funny, I switched from Foxpro to SQL Server long ago but STILL develop most apps mainly with VFP - this is where a lot of people are really confused about what VFP is and what it can do, especially for client/server/desktop apps. Visual Foxpro is so MUCH more than a backend database.  What's interesting is that we develop a lot of enterprise apps (yes, enterprise, OOP, nTier, the works) with VFP & SQL and most clients could care less (or even know) that we're using VFP. So people are switching, they just don't necessarily know it. {g}  It's all about delivering on promises by providing solutions that work on time and on budget. VFP (and many 3rd party tools) help us do that consistently.
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