Visual FoxPro History at Microsoft

Ken Levy has an interesting post up on his MashupX site since early last month.

Ken Levy’s Blog _ MashupX Visual FoxPro Strategy at Microsoft

The post goes into some fascinating details as to the history of Visual FoxPro at Microsoft. Most of it is well-known or obvious (making VFP.Net would break backward compatibility – which is what MS did with VB.Net as well)
I guess more details can be shared now – when VFP 9 was released, “the amount of sales for all versions of VFP combined annually was less revenue than Microsoft sales of Visual Studio in only one day”
It would be interesting to know however if some of those companies who were out there working on a VFP-like language in .Net were “persuaded” to stop their efforts, as some have suggested in various forums.

Well worth the read. The FoxPro community is what keeps VFP alive (thanks to VFPX and other initiatives) – and there were some members of that community inside of Microsoft at one point.
As he notes at the end “Only developers who have used FoxPro really appreciate it for what it was and still is.”


1 thought on “Visual FoxPro History at Microsoft”

  1. Very much true, I have been using FoxPro for almost four years and I like the way it is compared to other tools. Even though I am tempted to earn other language to cope with the user client request.

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