The House that Fox Built

Rod Paddock

In a posting on Microsoft’s Web site dated March 13, 2007, Microsoft announced that the company would not continue development of Visual FoxPro after the current product codenamed Sedna. That announcement marked a sad day for the Fox community (though the announcement didn’t come as much of a surprise).

I was and still am a member of the Fox community. Though I no longer write a lot of development code using Visual FoxPro, I still run my message board (www.foxforum.com) and participate in Visual FoxPro events from time to time.

I’m lucky to be a member of this community. I’m lucky to have found a product that allowed me the opportunity to travel the world, open a business, support a family, and build a home. I live in a house that Fox built.

I remember many years ago talking to my good friends Jim Duffy and John Petersen about how fortunate we were to have found Visual FoxPro and the VFP community. We all lived in houses that Visual FoxPro built.

As a matter of fact, CoDe Magazine started as Visual FoxPro publication and it debuted at the German Visual FoxPro DevCon many years ago. Along with the magazine itself, the founders and many of the writers for CoDe live in houses that Fox built. Jim Duffy, Rick Strahl (houses in Oregon and Hawaii, baby!), Markus Egger, and many others live in the Fox house.

Along with the folks I just mentioned, Microsoft (and other companies) have folks that also live in houses that Fox built. Some of them could probably appear on MTV Cribs! I can even name some very high-level software executives that are FoxPro alumni.

Eric Rudder is an Executive Vice President at Microsoft. Chris Caposella, former product manager, is a Vice President at Microsoft working with Microsoft Office. Tod Nelisen is CEO of Borland. YAG is an architect at Microsoft. Ken Levy is blazing the trail of the Microsoft Live initiative. And the list goes on and on.

The technologies for Language Integrated Query (LINQ) has some of its origins in Visual FoxPro. Visual FoxPro has possessed the ability to write inline queries for over ten years.

It was a sad day for a number of people when Microsoft made its announcement about the future of Visual FoxPro. At the very least, the product will continue in CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com) and Microsoft has committed to supporting the product through 2015.