In a recent project, part of the assignment is replacing a Visual Foxpro application with a more modern web-app.
As an intermediate step I may need to run and alter the old Foxpro application.
What is the most recent development environment or IDE for Visual Foxpro?
(my best guess is visual Studio 2005)
What are Foxpro experts using these days to develop Visual Foxpro apps?
Visual FoxPro v9.0 is the latest and last verion of Visual FoxPro. This product is no longer a part of Visual Studio.
VFP9 Service Pack 2 Build 7423, to be specific. We just use VFP -- there have been some 3rd-party attempts to tie Fox into the Visual Studio framework, but nothing that's come to fruition yet.
When trying to run the app, you may get errors depending on the way the old SQL queries are written. SET ENGINEBEHAVIOR 70 should allow them to run as they originally did, assuming the app is older than VFP8.
In addition to making sure you have VFP 9 SP2, there are several subsequent hotfixes, which you can download from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vfoxpro/bb264582.
Also, check out http://www.codeplex.com/VFPX, a community site that includes new and improved tools for VFP. You'll also find the best version of the VFP 9 SP2 Help file there.
To develop VFP apps we're still using VFP :)
To ease the migration away from VFP, especially while potentially needing to still leverage existing VFP databases, I would maybe look at:
Servoy, a solution for creating web and Java-based smart client applications from the same Javascript codebase, which can work directly with VFP data using a persistence layer. There are conversion services around for migrating existing VFP application forms and dialogs into this platform.
Dabo, a Python framework designed by ex-VFP gurus aimed at creating web and desktop applications. Designed by ex-VFP gurus.
