End Comes for FoxPro

Further development of Visual FoxPro (VFP) by Microsoft has ended, although mainstream support for the current version—VFP 9.0—will continue through 2010. The company will also make portions of the VFP code libraries available on CodePlex, Microsoft’s shared source development Web site.

The libraries moving to CodePlex, known as “Sedna,” help developers better integrate VFP applications with SQL Server and the .NET Framework. The core code for the VFP integrated development environment will not be on CodePlex.

Microsoft acquired FoxPro in 1992, but the product itself dates back to 1984, when it was developed as a work-alike to Ashton-Tate’s popular dBase product. Microsoft acquired the product in part as a response to the 1991 acquisition of dBase by Borland and also because it wanted to incorporate FoxPro’s query optimizer into the Jet database engine used by Visual Basic and Access. But FoxPro, even when it became a member of the Visual tools family, has never been central to Microsoft’s development strategy and updates to the product became less frequent and less significant as Microsoft moved resources to other projects.