Visual FoxPro 7.0 Beta 2 Announcement

Microsoft announced today that Microsoft Visual FoxPro 7.0 has entered Beta 2 and will ship earlier than expected. Beta 2 is a closed beta for Visual FoxPro developers who have worked closely with the Visual FoxPro team on previous beta versions of the product.

"Visual FoxPro will be ready to ship late this spring," said Ricardo Wenger, Visual FoxPro Group Manager. "Our customers have told us that they want all the new features we have been working on and we want to ship this product as soon as we can."

Microsoft also announced today that Visual FoxPro 7.0 will no longer be included in the upcoming Visual Studio.NET product. Visual FoxPro will continue to be available via MSDN Subscription Services, which provide priority access to Microsoft development software, product updates, and the essential programming information necessary to develop Web Services and applications.

"Shipping separately gives us not only the flexibility to ship Visual FoxPro 7.0 sooner, but also the ability to ship future versions with a shorter product cycle," said Wenger. "We don't have to wait for the next version of Visual Studio."

New Features in Visual FoxPro 7.0

Visual FoxPro offers a variety of features aimed at improving developer productivity and fully supporting the Microsoft Windows® 2000 operating system. These include the following areas:

Development Environment

IntelliSense. Use powerful, extensible language assistance as you type.
Dockable IDE Windows. Dock common tools such as Command Window, Data Session, and Debug windows.
Editor. Reduce development effort with new support for bookmarks and shortcuts, Find capabilities, case conversion, and document navigation.
Document View. View and navigate rapidly between procedure and method code.
Object Browser and Task Manager. Enhance developer productivity with new tools.

Data Enhancements

Database Events. Add event code to common database operations, such as opening a table or modifying a view.
OLE DB Provider. Provide a robust method for external clients to access Visual FoxPro data.
Server Improvements
COM+ Services. Create Visual FoxPro COM components that work with popular COM+ services, such as COM+ Events and Queued Components.
Implement Interfaces. Implement interfaces from other COM components for rich interaction, including callbacks.
Event Handling. Bind Visual FoxPro code to external client events, such as ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO) Recordset events.

Web Improvements

XML. Easily translate Visual FoxPro data to XML and back, and generate XMLUpdateGrams that work with SQL Server 2000.
Web Services. Publish and subscribe to Web Services anywhere on the Internet.
Text Merge. Work with any type of text, including HTML, XML, and ASP, directly inside code.

Other Improvements

Active Accessibility. Make applications accessible to third-party tools, such as screen readers, voice recognition devices, and automated test harnesses.
Deployment Tools. Quickly create installation setups for custom applications that meet Windows 2000 logo requirements.

Separate Product

Visual FoxPro is an extremely powerful application development tool. Its data-centric, object-oriented language offers developers a robust tool set for building database applications deployed on the desktop, as client-server solutions, or on the Web via components and Web Services. Visual FoxPro is optimized for building fast database applications and components.

Visual Studio.NET provides a development environment for building on the Microsoft .NET Framework. The .NET Framework provides a common language runtime and class libraries (including Windows Forms, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET), which combine to provide services and solutions for the Microsoft next-generation Web application development platform. For more information on Visual Studio.NET and the .NET Framework, visit the Visual Studio.NET Web site and the MSDN Online .NET Developer Center.

The Visual FoxPro team, after carefully reviewing extensive feedback from a broad range of customers, has decided to keep the existing Visual FoxPro application model and not make Visual FoxPro 7.0 a .NET language running on top of the common language runtime.

The reason for making this decision is to maintain the features that Visual FoxPro developers have come to rely on for many years. These include:

A data-centric language and fast powerful local data engine, which make it easy to manipulate large amounts of data very quickly.
An object-oriented programming model that includes both visual (forms and controls) and non-visual (code) classes with full inheritance.
A familiar development environment with its own set of highly productive tools for building database applications and components.

Since Visual FoxPro 7.0 is not a .NET language and does not share the Visual Studio.NET IDE, the decision has been made to ship it ahead of and separately from Visual Studio.NET. This will enable Visual FoxPro developers to benefit sooner from the new features in the product and to enjoy the productivity enhancements Visual FoxPro 7.0 provides.

Microsoft is committed to improving the Visual FoxPro product beyond version 7.0 and to continuing to serve the needs of FoxPro developers worldwide. Future versions of the product will directly address the most popular customer requests, as well as support enhancements coming in future versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system and Microsoft Office.

Last Updated: 2/26/01