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COPYRIGHT 2005 VNU Business Media Europe
Reader Piers Mahoney emailed to ask why we have not covered Visual Foxpro in PCW recently: 'I have been a Visual Foxpro user for many years and rate this product highly. In January 2005, Microsoft released the best update for Visual Foxpro (version 9) since the launch. As I understand it, Visual Foxpro is still has the fastest database engine around, and beats Access hands down' (see screen 1).
Microsoft merged with Fox Software in 1992, shortly before the first release of Access, the Microsoft database manager. It looked like an insurance policy against Access failing. As it turned out, Access was a huge success, leaving Microsoft apparently unsure what to do with Foxpro. Since then the product has been energetically developed, but the marketing has been nearly invisible outside the existing Foxpro community. Unlike Visual Basic, Foxpro has not been ported to .Net, but remains a native code development tool like old-style Visual Basic.
Like Access, Foxpro breaks down into components. First, there is a Foxpro database engine, which has always been among the fastest available. It is not a client-server engine, but can be used over a network by sharing the database files. So while performance is excellent on a single machine, it scales less well than client-server databases such as SQL Server. The file format is based on Dbase, with some Fox-specific extensions. You can also use Fox as a front end for SQL Server.
The next and most important part of Foxpro is its language. This is also based on Dbase, but with many extensions. Unlike Visual Basic, C# or C++, Foxpro's language...
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