Microsoft has enhanced the Visual FoxPro development environment to keep pace with rapid changes in business today.
"Many of the new features in Visual FoxPro 8.0 were taken directly from customer feedback," says Eric Rudder, senior vice president of the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division at Microsoft. "We view the Visual FoxPro community as a great example of developers and Microsoft working together."
Visual FoxPro 8.0 is the most advanced and reliable version of FoxPro ever released, and is compatible with Visual FoxPro 7.0, which makes upgrading easy. Developers can even create applications with Visual FoxPro 8.0 and deploy them using the Visual FoxPro 7.0 runtime, as long as no new commands and features are implemented in the distributed application. This allows developers and teams to upgrade to Visual FoxPro 8.0 and benefit from the wealth of new productivity features while transitioning existing applications to the newer runtime engine.
For developers, new important features in Visual FoxPro 8.0 fall into five areas:
- Expanded XML support for thoroughly modern applications in Visual FoxPro 8.0 make it a premier Microsoft .NET-compatible XML Web services development tool.
- Visual FoxPro 8.0 includes a new CursorAdapter class for unified data access to native Visual FoxPro tables, XML, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and Open Database Connectivity
(ODBC) or Object Linking & Embedding Database (OLE DB) data sources.
- Object-oriented base classes dramatically increase application flexibility. For example, developers can easily subclass member classes, such as pages in page frames, headers and columns in grids.
- New interface development environment (IDE) features within Visual FoxPro 8.0 increase developer productivity.
- Support for Windows XP Themes gives Visual FoxPro applications modern user interface capabilities; this support extends beyond the basic window dressing to include virtually all bundled controls at the form and container levels.
|