I got involved with xBase development tools over 20 years ago, and I have a real soft spot for Visual FoxPro (VFP). In the 1980's dBase III+ was a very good product, but I switched to FoxPro (and later Visual FoxPro) in the early 1990's.

What's So Great About VFP?

Visual FoxPro is an interesting tool. It is way more powerful than your typical desktop database, such as Access. It's fully object-oriented and optimized for database development. It's really the best all-around desktop database development tool on the market, bar none.  VFP allows you to create powerful desktop applications using either its local engine, or with SQL Server. I'm very sorry to hear Microsoft is no longer improving VFP, but that was a surprise to nobody.  

Visual FoxPro has excellent database specific features, functionals and capabilities. Many of the advanced database features have been rolled into SQL Server, so that should tell you something. VFP is a highly productive tool as well. You can do an amazing amount of work in a very short amount of time with it. 

Visual FoxPro is also well known for speed. You can process an amazing amount of information, thanks to Rushmore technology. In many cases applications written in C (which is fast) couldn't keep up with the highly optimized code VFP produced. 

And then along came the Internet

As you can probably tell, I'm a big fan of Visual FoxPro. But today web development is the main focus of most organizations, and Visual FoxPro just isn't that strong in that arena. So if you need a web application, I would recommend you use C# ,Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. But if what you really need is a desktop, client-server database application, Visual FoxPro is the undisputed king.

If you'd like to discuss your Visual FoxPro project with me, call my direct line. It's 1.800.984.6977 Ext. 708.