Visual FoxPro (Discontinued) Reviews & Insights

We are using FoxPro for few customers. There are still many businesses that are using VFP although Microsoft stopped supporting it years ago. Many legacy applications, particularly BFSI, Healthcare, Real Estate, are running on Visual FoxPro. These software applications and products are being used by hundreds of businesses, that are now so much hooked to VFP, that they do not want to switch to newer technologies. As a result, there are a wide range of companies across market segments that need constant support to their VFP products. We at Apptread (an ImpactQA company) have helped several customers in maintaining their legacy applications on FoxPro. So much so that we even automated the regression suite making rolling out new features, easy. There are not too many developers today that are willing to work on VFP but there are still a bunch of companies that are keeping the VFP developers engaged. Some customers have started moving their VFP applications to .NET but that would also need an understanding of VFP code. As a result folks with good VFP and .NET experience are most sought after programmers. VFP has many advantages over other new age tech. Looks like VFP may not have a great future but it is certainly here to stay for few more years. It would be too early to write it off.

Legacy applications already on VFP are a good candidate. If you plan to move to iOS and Android apps, VFP is not for you. Also, in future access to VFP programmers may be limited. You could use VFP as a powerful database tool. I know of many programmers who love to exploit the features of VFP to create easy to use applications.

FoxPro is used to develop a plug-in for our stock management software.

FoxPro is good for data manipulation from files.
It is easy to generate/design reports of those data.

We use FoxPro to support Sage Pro customers, Accountmate customers, and customers who have custom foxpro applications either built by us or by other people. Our whole organization uses FoxPro. It serves the purpose of application development, database frontend to SQL and Access, and a report generation tool. We write, develop, maintain, and support FoxPro for businesses ranging from very small to hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

It's well suited to support existing applications and not very well suited to develop new applications especially those that would reside in the cloud. It is possible to have Foxpro frontends to Oracle, SQL, MySQL, and other databases, but it is not possible to run FoxPro apps on an Android or an iPhone.