Yesterday (10/14), I attended a MSDN Developer Series session in Fort Wayne, IN, hosted by Microsoft Midwest. The session was titled DEV130: Choosing the Right Tool in Visual Studio. For over three hours, I listened to the speaker (Gaylen Michaels) expound on the wonders of Visual InterDev, Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Visual J++.

Did you folks notice something missing from the above list of products? So did I, and intermittently throughout the three hours, I voiced what has become a broken record for this fellow, “WHAT ABOUT VISUAL FOXPRO?” In the PowerPoint slide which presented the tools which can be used in Visual Studio, VFP wasn’t even mentioned. Each of the four above-mentioned products had at least 10 slides about it, expounding on its virtues and interoperability with the rest of Visual Studio. VFP had none. The point is this: If I (and my fellow Foxhead co-worker) didn’t attend the session and make a point of bringing it up, FoxPro would have received absolutely no attention. The only mention that VFP received at all (outside of the discussion I initiated) was when he discussed what was common among the tools. In response to my question, he confirmed that VFP uses IntelliSense and uses the IDE. I haven’t had a chance to see VFP 6.0 yet, so I’ll have to take his word on it, despite the fact that Gaylen admitted he hasn’t seen VFP either, and really isn’t that familiar with the product.

Gaylen, you see, describes himself as an Internet developer. Perhaps it was just his personal bias, or perhaps it was the will of Microsoft, but the entire three-hour presentation seemed to be geared toward instructing us how to create Web-ready applications. He extolled the virtues of Active Server Pages, the similarity between Win32 and DHTML, went on and on about J++, IIS, SQL Server, and focused on the Windows DNA Architecture, showing how the Web is at the center of all of what we should be doing.

When I confronted him about the omission of Visual FoxPro, and tried to explain to him how, while FoxPro may not be the best choice for a Web-based solution, it is still the hands-down leader for desktop database development, he responded with this quote (paraphrased somewhat): “The market decides what is to be used, and we must respond to what the market wants. Right now, the market has indicated that Web-based solutions are desired. Microsoft is heavily marketing Visual Studio, focusing on how VB is the core language of Microsoft Office, and how all of the tools can be used to develop Internet solutions. It’s a question of marketing, NOT NECESSARILY WHAT IS THE BEST TOOL FOR THE JOB.”

I went on to ask him why Microsoft is offering VFP certification for an application that they’re not even marketing or recommending. Before Gaylen could answer, one of my classmates chimed in: “Well, they’re also offering certification in Windows 3.11. That doesn’t mean that they’re supporting it or recommending it for new development.” Right there, he made my case. I responded that while there may not be any new machines with Windows 3.11, there still are a helluva lot of existing machines that are running Windows 3.11, and they’re not going away anytime soon, despite Microsoft’s marketing blitz. Where I’m working now, an international insurance and financial services group, close to half of the machines are running Windows 3.11, and will be for the next few years. In the same vein, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of FoxPro 2.x and Visual FoxPro 3.0/5.0 apps running out there that aren't going to be retired or replaced, don’t need a rewrite in Visual Basic, but would benefit greatly from the latest version of VFP. New development may be a combination of the existing VFP apps, interacting with Visual Basic or Visual C++. Hell, for the past two years Microsoft has been suggesting we use VFP as the middle layer in a 3-tier or N-tier system, using it for the business model. If that’s what they want, market it as such and present it at the conferences.

It was a very useful session, very enlightening. The fact that I had driven two hours to attend it, taking an unpaid day off of work, shows that I have accepted the inevitable, and that in order to make it in the coming years we have to be competent in all of Visual Studio, and master at least one or two of them. I’m in no way suggesting that we use VFP exclusively. I’m just more than a little disgusted that Microsoft’s marketing will not even present it as an alternative.

This session was advertised as a 100-level course, geared toward explaining what the different parts of Visual Studio were and when to use what tool. The overall impression I got was that this should have been a 200-level course, geared specifically to the Internet developer who needs to create a Web-based solution using all of Visual Studio, using SQL Server (or Oracle, Gaylen conceded) as the database back end. If it has been advertised as such, I could have saved my gas money.

Bill Yater
MCP, Visual FoxPro 3.0