The SPS Weblog - Doug Hennig Blog and TIOBE

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Doug Hennig Blog
The number of great Visual FoxPro-related blogs continues to increase. The most recent addition is Doug Hennig's Blog. You'll want to keep an eye on this one, I know I will be. Doug is one of the most active, giving, and experienced members of the Visual FoxPro Community. Welcome to the blogosphere Doug - commence to blowing doors off!

TIOBE
The number of Visual FoxPro blogs is one of the contributing factors to the continued meteoric rise of Visual FoxPro on the TIOBE Programming Community Index (TPCI). When Visual FoxPro first appeared in the top 20, I made a New Year's resolution to do my part to move it up another 5 spots. The Visual FoxPro Community has beat expectations (as we so often do) and it is now sitting in the 13th spot. That's a move of 7 spots in 4 months and for the first time ever Visual FoxPro enjoys an "A--" status. While the TPCI does not give a good indication of overall numbers or use of a language, it does speak directly to a language's visibility. And like so many things about Visual FoxPro these days, its visibility is on the upswing.

Quote from the April 2006 TPCI - "There is an interesting 'new' generation of programming languages that entered the TPCI top 20 recently. Most of these languages are not really new but they are now for the first time in the spotlight. It concerns Visual FoxPro, ColdFusion, VB.NET, Ruby, and D. Visual FoxPro is even heading for an 'A' status."

LINQ - VFP 10?
Some have been raising the prospect that the next version of Visual Studio (Orcas) will bring C# and VB.NET up to Visual FoxPro's level when it comes to building data-centric applications. While LINQ is a good move in the right direction for the .NET framework (significant portions of it were heavily influenced by Visual FoxPro), don't for a minute be fooled into thinking that LINQ will close the gap. Visual FoxPro is and will be the absolute best development tool that Microsoft has for building data-centric applications for a long time to come (the current version of Visual FoxPro is supported by Microsoft until 2015), and with the growing need of businesses to consolidate disparate systems with a wide-range of data formats and backends, this is a big deal and a market that Visual FoxPro and the developers that work with it are born to serve.

Just warming up
So what's next? More community members start VFP-related blogs, VFP reaches top 10 in the TPCI, Sedna potential begins to be realized, Congress enacts a 36 hour day so VFP developers can get all their work done, and of course... Visual FoxPro takes over the World. If you're a business with data/informational needs or a developer of data-centric applications, you need look no further than Visual FoxPro. It's absolutely the best there is.

Visual Foxpro

Sunday, April 02, 2006 9:47:44 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [4]

Sunday, April 02, 2006 10:53:44 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)

Craig Bailey and yourself have definitely got me off my bum and blogging.

Thanks for the keynote at OzFox Lite!

Jamie Osborn

Monday, April 03, 2006 1:30:02 AM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)

Hi Jamie,

>>Craig Bailey and yourself have definitely got me off my bum and blogging.

Thanks for stopping by and I'm glad to see you're blogging again. The more Visual FoxPro-related content available out here the better.

>>Thanks for the keynote at OzFox Lite!

LOL! Sure thing. That keynote (which probably took some by surprise) and the OzFox Lite promo video were fun to put together. Until next time I'll be here, eating mom's P&J sammys, and doing my part to help invent the future of Visual FoxPro.

Craig Boyd

Friday, June 02, 2006 11:45:19 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)

I wouldn't ever want to argue with Mr. Hennig. I spent a number of years using
Stonefield AppBuilder and have the highest regard for the work he's done.

And FoxPro too.

But when I go to the bookstore and see about a 1/2 dozen shelves about C#, VB.NET
and related topics, and can't find even one book on VFP, I get sort of worried.
Up until a year ago I expected to find at least something about VFP - now it's
become invisible - at least at all three of the different bookstores where I've
been recently.

David W. Dee

Saturday, June 03, 2006 7:45:40 AM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)

Hi David,

I've noticed your comments on several of the blog entries here regarding the apparent lack of Visual FoxPro books. While I will agree with you that you’d be hard pressed to find such at your local bookstore and I’d also concede that there are much less books published for Visual FoxPro than for C# and VB.NET, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any books with information related to Visual FoxPro. A quick search on http://www.hentzenwerke.com/ or even http://Amazon.com will turn up many possible titles to choose from. Perhaps not as convenient as grabbing one off the shelf, but many online book sellers offer rush delivery if needed.

However, even if there didn’t exist a single book for Visual FoxPro, I wouldn't use that as an indicator of the value, usefulness, marketability, and/or the future of Visual FoxPro and the developers that work in it. Times are tough in the publishing industry (especially for IT publications). Numbers are down pretty consistently across the board, and authors/publishers are having to be much more selective than they were prior to information becoming universally available (mostly for free) on the internet.

Fortunately, Visual FoxPro has an active and growing community of developers that are quite generous with their time and information online in the form of forums, wikis, blogs, screencasts, podcasts, downloads, etc. So anyone wanting to learn Visual FoxPro or needing information or answers are not hard-pressed to find them.

If you’re looking for indicators that a particular language is in trouble, I guess you’ll find them. There’s always something somewhere that can be looked at as a negative indicator… whether it be with Visual FoxPro or some other language. However, that having been said, you would virtually need to shut your eyes and plug your ears and shout “NANANANANANA!” at the top of your lungs not to notice the positive momentum and increase that Visual FoxPro and the developers that work in it have been experiencing in the past two years.

More and more developers and customers are looking for a suitable solution that other products are unable to provide. When it comes to data-centric applications with lightning speed that need to be produced quickly and/or on a limited budget by skilled devlopers with decades of experience, I see Visual FoxPro getting the nod… regardless of what books are available at the local Barnes and Noble.

Craig Boyd

Name
E-mail	(will show your gravatar icon)
Home page

	Remember Me
Comment (Some html is allowed: `a@href@title, b, blockquote@cite, em, i, strike, strong, sub, super, u`)
Enter the code shown (prevents robots):

Archive

On this page....

Categories