Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Visual FoxPro on Windows Vista

Windows Vista is on it's way
Many are speculating that Microsoft is doing whatever it takes to get their newest OS released before the end of 2006. It won't be long and Visual FoxPro developers will be catering to customers running Windows Vista. Microsoft's Visual FoxPro Roadmap has Sedna currently scheduled for release sometime around the 2Q of 2007. This could lead some Visual FoxPro developers to be somewhat alarmed as one of the things that Sedna will provide is the ability for Visual FoxPro applications to be more successfully deployed on Windows Vista.

Seems to work fine
In order to ascertain just what kinds of problems we are going to run into deploying and running Visual FoxPro 9.0 applications on Windows Vista without Sedna, I decided to give it a go. I installed Windows Vista Beta 2 - Build 5231 on a Windows XP Professional box using Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005. Then I installed a copy of Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP1 into Windows Vista and started playing around with it. While it will be sometime before I can make a final determination regarding the complete viability of deploying Visual FoxPro 9.0 applications on Windows Vista, for now I am quite pleased with how well Visual FoxPro appears to run and act in Windows Vista. I'll report back with more once I have had the time to take a closer look. For now, here's a screen shot of Visual FoxPro running like a top on Windows Vista.

NOTE: Given that I am using Microsoft's Virtual Server, the Aero Glass effects are not enabled because the graphics card emulator doesn't support them. This is not a limitation of Visual FoxPro, but rather a limitation of the environment in which I am hosting Windows Vista.

Thursday, February 02, 2006 3:35:02 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Comments [5]
Thursday, February 02, 2006 5:56:25 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Nice to see this: thanks, Craig!

(Hmmm, wonder what ever happened to my screenshot of Fox 7 running under Microsoft Bob....)
Garrett Fitzgerald
Thursday, March 30, 2006 10:58:15 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
A few years back, while I was at MS, I installed an early engineering build of Longhorn (Vista) and ran VFP on it...quite possibly the 1st person in the world to do so :-)
John Koziol
Friday, February 09, 2007 3:58:06 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Hi Craig,

We are prepping for the Vista certification process for some of our solutions. My concern is for installing and incorporating manifest files(embedding them into VFP exe files) and applying digital certificates to deal with the UAC which will undoubtedly be enabled in clients workstations.

Aside from all this, there are the usual checks to make sure your application does not try writing to the installation folder (like many external update processes tend to do), otherwise it looks like one can end up with a mess due to the file and registry virtualization.

Have you had any time to play with these areas????

Benjamin Siegel
Saturday, March 17, 2007 8:20:42 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
Ben, I have played with this a bunch <s> and overall most of the things are just fine. I'm not sure where VFP will land on certification though - that would have to come from Microsoft I suspect and I doubt that will happen this late in the game.

There are obviously issues that need to be dealt with on Vista like automatic updates and choosing the proper file locations for updateable files which is really nothing new. Some issues like automatic updates can be gotten around with by requiring elevation which I think will become a fact of life for some administrative features and functions.
Rick Strahl
Monday, September 24, 2007 6:06:14 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
Thank you very much for posting this! It gave me the "ok I will try it" attitude, and, due to a lack of time and machine availability, we have Fox 9 up and running on Vista Home Premium.

I am having a problem getting my final app to run, though, and Benjamin's comment about "registry virtualization" and Rick's comment about "proper file locations for updateable files" makes me wonder if my problem is deeper than I think.

Everything runs, everything loads, until it tries to find a third party remote database using a dbisam ODBC driver. Then it acts like it can't find it anywhere.

Any clues as to how this other "stuff" y'all are mentioning might come into play would be most appreciated!

Thanks,
RLS
Randy Smith
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