Microsoft's FoxPro strategy

The news is only a few months old so in many ways this is the most attractive strategy at the moment. We've another eight years before Microsft end their support for Visual FoxPro and a lot can happen in that time. Eight years ago I was being told that FoxPro was a dead end and that the future lay with VB6. The people who told me that were partially right but their language suffered before Fox did. They have had to forget almost everything they knew in order to learn the dotNet version of Visual Basic whilst I've enjoyed the new features and backwards compatibility of VFP 7, 8 and 9.

SQL Server seems to be stable as Microsoft's way of storing data but I'm less sure where they are going with the front end. As I write this in late 2007 Microsoft are pushing Linq as the logical replacement for FoxPro and are making Access easier for the casual user. Perhaps Linq will be the answer. Perhaps Access will be expanded to become more of a developer's tool again. Perhaps all our data will be stored in an Open Source database on the web. It's difficult to know.

"Prediction is difficult, especially about the future"

Neils Bohr