Microsoft says Visual FoxPro 9.0 will be its last version of the development software, though support for the product will extend through 2015.
Microsoft has announced that it will not be releasing any new versions of its Visual FoxPro development software past Version 9.0, but the company will continue to support the technology through 2015.
Instead of releasing new versions of FoxPro, Microsoft will release core portions of the FoxPro software to its CodePlex community development site, said Alan Griver, a group manager within the Microsoft Visual Studio team, which leads the FoxPro team.
Microsoft will continue to support the Visual FoxPro core until 2015 with standard support through January 2010 and extended support through January 2015 via the developer tools life-cycle support plan, Microsoft officials said.
Meanwhile, some of the FoxPro-related technology can be seen in other Microsoft products such as SQL Server, Team Foundation Server and various portions of the .Net Framework, Griver said. Indeed, some observers have said they could detect a link between FoxPro and Microsofts LINQ (Language Integrated Query) technology.
Griver said the FoxPro development team will be spread out across various groups in the Microsoft Developer Division, including those working on Visual Studio—including the upcoming next major release of Visual Studio, code-named "Orcas," and beyond.
"We believe that by working with the community to continue to allow the FoxPro technology to be enhanced, that will help" developers who currently have projects written in FoxPro, Griver said.
The FoxPro community has been very active in adding functionality to the platform, building an Outlook control bar for FoxPro, support for MSBuild and a code checking tool similar to the FXCop tool that exists for Visual Studio.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has been working on "Sedna," which is the code name for the project that takes advantage of enhancements in Visual FoxPro 9.0. The primary goal of Sedna is to expand on the ability of Visual FoxPro-based solutions to better integrate with other Microsoft products and technologies, such as Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and Windows Vista.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
offshore foxpro development
Expressing a now-familiar theme, a Microsoft executive at the ApacheCon conference on Friday morning touted Microsoft's efforts to be more open, highlighting moves such as offering the company's "M" modeling language under the Microsoft "Open Specification Promise."
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During the New Orleans conference, Microsoft's Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy, stressed continuing accommodations for the open source world. Microsoft traditionally has been viewed as the opposite side of the coin from open source but has been preaching its open source epiphany at events such as ApacheCon and the EclipseCon 2008 conference in March.
[ See InfoWorld's coverage of M, Azure, and more in InfoWorld's special report on last week's Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. ]
Ramji touted Microsoft's "inclusion-based strategy" for growth. Companies such as HP, IBM, Sun and now Microsoft participate in open source to build sustainable business models, he said. Microsoft has to have its platforms include as many different technologies as possible, Ramji said. Growth is done through having more people find the platform interesting, he stressed.
Ramji noted the M language being made available under the Open Specification Promise, in which Microsoft agrees not to assert legal rights or patents over on implementations. M is part of Microsoft's Oslo modeling platform. Other efforts were noted, such as welcoming dynamic languages such as Ruby and Python onto Microsoft's technology platform.
"M to me is a possible realization of a lot of what I believe in," Ramji said. By serving as a meta language for developers to write specific grammars, such as a BPMN grammar, M could do for languages what open source has done for development, he said. Developers can write grammars without having to worry about whether they have structured a full language.
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Domain-specific languages could be built for health care or an M compiler could be developed for Mono, which is a Linux implementation of Microsoft's .Net Framework., Ramji said. He invited ApacheCon attendees to consider the M specification.
Microsoft's Azure platform for cloud services, announced last week, also makes accommodations for open source languages such as Ruby, Java, and PHP, Ramji said.
"What (Microsoft chief software architect) Ray Ozzie has said about Azure is it needs to be inclusive, it needs to be open," Ramji said.
Other efforts toward openness cited included offering up offshore FoxPro development(9) to the FoxPro community at large and enabling OpenXML support in Apache's POI (Poor Obfuscation Implementation). The project features APIs for manipulating file formats based on Microsoft's OLE 2 Compound Document format using Java.
Microsoft is participating in development of AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol), an Internet protocol for business messaging, Ramji said. "We have a lot of message-queuing experience," he said. "We're working with Qpid [an implementation of of AQMP] developers in understanding how we could best help that project be successful," said Ramji.
Ramji also said Microsoft's Live ID identity system federates with the Open ID platform.
In a blog accompanying his presentation, Ramji said Microsoft has decided to move the development of protocol parsers for Microsoft Network Monitor, a free protocol analyzer and network sniffer, to an open source model on the company's CodePlex Web site.
Nucleus Report: Who's ready for SMB? - read this white paper.
During the New Orleans conference, Microsoft's Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy, stressed continuing accommodations for the open source world. Microsoft traditionally has been viewed as the opposite side of the coin from open source but has been preaching its open source epiphany at events such as ApacheCon and the EclipseCon 2008 conference in March.
[ See InfoWorld's coverage of M, Azure, and more in InfoWorld's special report on last week's Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. ]
Ramji touted Microsoft's "inclusion-based strategy" for growth. Companies such as HP, IBM, Sun and now Microsoft participate in open source to build sustainable business models, he said. Microsoft has to have its platforms include as many different technologies as possible, Ramji said. Growth is done through having more people find the platform interesting, he stressed.
Ramji noted the M language being made available under the Open Specification Promise, in which Microsoft agrees not to assert legal rights or patents over on implementations. M is part of Microsoft's Oslo modeling platform. Other efforts were noted, such as welcoming dynamic languages such as Ruby and Python onto Microsoft's technology platform.
"M to me is a possible realization of a lot of what I believe in," Ramji said. By serving as a meta language for developers to write specific grammars, such as a BPMN grammar, M could do for languages what open source has done for development, he said. Developers can write grammars without having to worry about whether they have structured a full language.
Are you ready for event-driven business? - watch this webcast.
Domain-specific languages could be built for health care or an M compiler could be developed for Mono, which is a Linux implementation of Microsoft's .Net Framework., Ramji said. He invited ApacheCon attendees to consider the M specification.
Microsoft's Azure platform for cloud services, announced last week, also makes accommodations for open source languages such as Ruby, Java, and PHP, Ramji said.
"What (Microsoft chief software architect) Ray Ozzie has said about Azure is it needs to be inclusive, it needs to be open," Ramji said.
Other efforts toward openness cited included offering up offshore FoxPro development(9) to the FoxPro community at large and enabling OpenXML support in Apache's POI (Poor Obfuscation Implementation). The project features APIs for manipulating file formats based on Microsoft's OLE 2 Compound Document format using Java.
Microsoft is participating in development of AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol), an Internet protocol for business messaging, Ramji said. "We have a lot of message-queuing experience," he said. "We're working with Qpid [an implementation of of AQMP] developers in understanding how we could best help that project be successful," said Ramji.
Ramji also said Microsoft's Live ID identity system federates with the Open ID platform.
In a blog accompanying his presentation, Ramji said Microsoft has decided to move the development of protocol parsers for Microsoft Network Monitor, a free protocol analyzer and network sniffer, to an open source model on the company's CodePlex Web site.
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