VFP Devcon's Keynote in Las Vegas was well attended. Present from Microsoft were Y. Alan Griver, Ken Levy, Randy Brown, John Koziol and Richard Stanton.
The following is based on quick notes taken during the meeting.
The main topics were:
Visual FoxPro "State of the Union"
- Microsoft Platform overview
- VFP Roadmap overview
- Sedna overview
- VFP 9.0 demos
- VFP 9.0 with .NET Interop demos
- Sedna very early preview demo
The theme of the meeting was "transparency", defined as "you can see inside Microsoft (where VFP is concerned) and see what they are doing and where they are going".
They showed a Powerpoint slide with statistics from the latest VFP Survey (April 2005).
51% have used VFP over 10 years
- 33% are now using VFP 9.0
- 80% small company, 68% mid-size, 27% enterprise
- 71% maintaining apps, 69% new apps, 25% web apps
- 89% DBFs, 55% SQL Server, 22% MSDE, 21% MySql, 14% Oracle, 4% DB2
- 75% integrate Office with VFP apps
- 11% apps 1000+ users, 43% 100+, 30% under 25
- 26% VS.NET, 21% XML WS, 25% ASP/ASP.NET, 35% COM
- 20% VB6, 13% VB.NET, 12% C#, 10% Java, 8% C++
- 31% plan to use VS.NET within next 2 years
- 98% plan to using VFP within next 12 months
(see David Stevenson's blog for more details)
Ken Levy confirmed that VFP 9.0 SP1 is scheduled to be released near the end of 2005, most probably December.
He showed Microsoft's Grand Strategy, not from the point of view of marketing but to show were they are going and what the goals for Sedna (the next version of FoxPro) are going to be.
Starting with Visual Studio 2005 (to be released Nov. 7th 2005), plus SQL Server 2005, then on to Longhorn (the next release of Windows), and some of the companion parts Indigo and Avalon/XAML.
Indigo is mostly for communication between components, eventually replacing SOAP and the current Web Services engine and solving some of its problems.
Avalon is a unified approach to user interface. XAML is a special version of XML to define the Avalon interface to the user.
Ken mentioned that Sedna is slated for release on the first half of 2007, with possible releases of public betas along the way. This should be right after Longhorn and before the release of Orcas (the codename for the next version of Visual Studio, after VS 2005).
Ken stressed that SQL Server 2005 (codename Yukon) works great with Visual FoxPro 9.0
What is Sedna?
Sedna is the code name for VFP 9.0 SP2 plus Add-ons. Will it be called VFP 10.0? Will it be called VFP 9.1 or 9.5? The answer is that at this point nobody knows. It is still too early to say at this point.
Sedna is composed of:
- Limited core product updates
- New and improved Xbase components
- .NET wrapper classes for use within VFP
- Product DLLs for extensibility
One important point that was stressed is that at this point Sedna is in the early planning stages and that they want, and expect the VFP Community to be involved and to let them know what is wanted and needed.
Some ideas, subject to change as it is still too early, is to have a good compatibility with Visual Studio 2005 and with Orcas. To leverage the .NET Framework 2.0 via Interop and to extend Interop support for useful .NET classes including Web Services, XML, etc.
Further along, the wish is for easy output to Avalon/XAML and improved Indigo and WinFS Interop.
As for the Xbase components that are envisioned, are new and more Xbase Intellisense scripts, XML docs, RSS Task Pane and reporting components.
Randy Brown followed with a few demos of current VFP 9.0 features, including some GDI+. He showed an interesting idea from Calvin Hsia (who could not make it to Devcon this time), using "Shell Namespace Extensions" a technology he used to intercept calls to Windows Explorer and display in a Web Browser control in a VFP form (here Calvin talks about it).
Randy also demoed a little utility Calvin wrote to post and read blogs directly from a VFP form, (using RSS). He started a new Blog for Sedna issues and posted to it from a VFP form live directly from Devcon.
Ken Levy came back to the podium to show some demos of Visual FoxPro 9.0 in action with .Net Interop, using a Web Service created in .Net, reading VFP data, and consuming it in a VFP app.
He also showed XML and XSLT in VFP using the older Microsoft.XMLDOM and then the same app using .NET components in the System.XML namespace (basically the equivalent of XMLDOM). Why would you like to do it this way instead? The idea is to look to the future, to the time, not too far away when SOAP and the XMLDOM become obsolete. NET will have features that SOAP will never have at that point. Training yourself like this now will make you ready for it.
As part of the ideas of how to maybe combine these new technologies in the near future, Ken also showed a VFP form that when clicking on a button it opened an Avalon form with some graphic routines running in it. The use for something like that? Too early to say but maybe a future customer has an Avalon app or portions of an app that you want to seamlessly call and interact with. He also did a more advanced, and useful example of a nice looking expense report form in Avalon (an early version). Then he made some minor changes to the underlying XAML code from VFP and recompiled and run it, all from Visual FoxPro.
Lastly he showed how Click Once deployment using VB.NET for example, calling a VFP COM object containing business logic, which was marked as ' isolate DLL' (also known as 'registry free') allows for an easy deployment of all components from an automatically built .NET manifest, all without touching the clinet machine's Registry.
Some of the VFP Report extensibility demos and others will be shown publicly in a Channel9 interview he just finished and which should be published before the end of June.
It's too early to tell where all of this is going to go, but I am exited with the possibilities. Considering that VFP is a mature language we can see that there still exist ways to improve it.
It pleases me to know that when a future customer gets a new PC, pre-loaded with Longhorn, I can say for sure that his existing programs will run on it. And Microsoft backs this assertion up.
The most important theme I got from the meeting was Microsoft's VFP Group keen interest in hearing from us, the community on what direction this should take.