Here’s an update to the ‘Visual Foxpro to Real Studio Converter’. I’ve just released version 0.2Beta.

There are numerous updates including:

• The Real Studio project now properly identifies the forms as belonging to the project.
• More controls are converted such as the Option Groups and Image Controls
• The method code for the forms and command buttons are converted into the Real Studio Windows, but are commented out. This should make it so you can manually convert your code into RealBasic.
• The project is now under the MIT license which is very open and friendly.

I hope that you find the project interesting, and … helpful! If you make enhancements, or find a bug, just let me know.

I hope that you find Real Studio as easy and fun to develop in as I do.

-Kevin

One of the technologies that I’m moving to is Real Studio (RealBasic) by Real Software Inc., located in Austin, TX, USA. The joy and productivity that I had in VFP, I find in RS. Did I mention that it’s cross platform: Linux, Mac and Windows! There’s even a web edition!

Anyway, wouldn’t you wish that there was a utility to convert your VFP forms over to Real Studio? Well wish no more! Take a look.

Still here? Okay, lets look at the pros and cons:

PROS:

1. Converts your forms over from VFP to RS
2. Keeps the controls naming convention
3. The converter is free to use!
4. The converter is open sourced in that if there is a bug you could even fix it yourself and keep going!

Cons:

1. Not all controls are supported just yet.
2. Only converts forms; no reports, labels, menus, classes, programs
3. None of the method or even code code is converted
4. Not tested on heavily subclassed forms
5. Doesn’t make you taller or better looking
6. Who the hell is Kevin Cully anyway?

Well anyway, I do really like Real Studio and I hope you find this converter interesting. If you find a bug or need an enhancement, please drop me a line. It helps to incentivize me if you would tell me how this would make the world a better place for you. If you find (and fix) a bug or make an enhancement, let me know and give back! We can make version 0.2beta even better!

Download the VFPtoRS source code here! Version 0.1beta [60k]

Oh yes, I’m also speaking at the Real World Conference in May 2012 in Orlando. Come on down and learn more about Real Studio! If you are a VFP developer, I think you’ll like using it as a development platform as much as I do.

Thanks everyone!

I’ll be speaking on “REAL Studio for the VFP Developer”. As all of you know, I love me some Visual Foxpro. The Visual Foxpro development team has done an incredible job with that product over the many many years of it’s active development. Thank you Fox Software! And yes, a big ‘Thank You’ to MicroSoft for version 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and (especially) 9 of Visual Foxpro! Many, many sincere gratitudes go out to all of the VFPX developers as well keeping the progress of the open-sourced parts of Foxpro going! The hard labors of genius developers are moving Foxpro forward.

So, what you won’t hear at my presentation in May is that I want you to abandon Visual Foxpro for REAL Studio.

What you will hear, is that I do think you should add REAL Studio to your development toolbox. I found that my Visual Foxpro skills and Visual Foxpro mindset is a natural fit for the REAL Studio development environment. I find that joy in development that I have doing Visual Foxpro, I can also have in REAL Studio.

What I’ll be going over in the presentation:

• How VFP and REAL Studio compare
• What are the strengths of REAL Studio
• What are the weaknesses of REAL Studio
• Development ‘gotchas’ in REAL Studio
• How to build a desktop application from scratch
• How to call one window from another
• How to access databases
• How to create and run a report
• How to build for target Linux, Mac and Windows platforms
• A small bit about building Web Applications with REAL Studio
• More!

If you are in the Detroit area, on Thursday May 12th, please stop in and say ‘hello’!

I’m very unsatisfied with my answer. In the end, the “I don’t know” and “We’ll never know” is the ultimate answer but lets take a closer look at why that is the case.

Let me start off by saying that I have only ever purchased one copy of Visual Foxpro. One. Ever. So I get counted as “1“. To make matters worse, I believe that version was Visual Foxpro 9.0 when it was first released and I got some sort of huge discount at the time. I admit that I have been a professional Foxpro and Visual Foxpro developer since about 1992 and I have only purchased one version of Visual Foxpro and it was one of the last versions that Microsoft has published. I will posit that I have been a legal Foxpro owner all along.

The ultimate reason is how Foxpro and Visual Foxpro was sold. In the early days Foxpro was sold stand alone. All of those years, each company that I was employed with purchased a copy of Foxpro per developer. I wasn’t the independent consultant at that time. At that time, counts of Foxpro developers were possible.

Once Visual Foxpro 5.0 came along, it was bundled with Visual Studio. Yes, you could purchase Visual Foxpro stand-alone but it made best financial sense to just purchase all of Visual Studio. By Microsoft’s own admission, they didn’t count a sale of Visual Studio as a ‘user’ of Foxpro. However, if I recall correctly they *did* count them as users of Visual Basic.

Soon, Microsoft came out with their MSDN subscription which basically was a mountain of CDs of every OS, development tool, and piece of software produced by Microsoft. To have a years worth of updates for Windows, SQL Server along with Foxpro was very appealing. Again, many many developers and companies purchased the MSDN subscription and the Foxpro developers went uncounted.

By the time I went on my own as an independent consultant, Microsoft has the ‘Empower’ program. It was basically the MSDN program but for small business owners and software developers intent on creating and selling software products. I subscribed to that for many years and was never counted as a Foxpro developer.

Lets take a look for a moment at Foxpro itself. Foxpro doesn’t require registration with Microsoft. It doesn’t phone home. There is a way to report errors back to Microsoft, but that’s optional. Most of the time, I don’t report my Foxpro crashes/errors back to Microsoft. Bottom line, is that Foxpro can be pirated without Microsoft knowing. China is a huge user of Foxpro based on some indicators but their sales of Foxpro is almost non-existant. Not too many sales of Microsoft products in China either. There are a lot of Foxpro developers in Russia and the Eastern European countries.

Heck, there’s a lot of Foxpro developers all over the world. The database power, and low system requirements of VFP make it a great low, middle, and high power development tool.

Being a member of the Atlanta Foxpro Users Group, I know there are hundreds and hundreds (if not thousands) of Foxpro developers in Georgia alone … but we never see them. We’ll see people who have lost their job, they come to one meeting, get a new job even programming with Foxpro, and we never see them again. Frustrating. Don’t programmers want to work on developing their skills in their ‘art’?!?!

I digress.

Is there a way to count Foxpro developers? I don’t think so. We’re many but we’ll never know how many. Any other ideas on how to get a true count of Visual Foxpro developers?

I must say that I haven’t ever seen this one before. I’m transitioning from an XP Pro machine to a new Vista machine. I’m now trying to debug through a VCX and … this. What gives?!?!

SW Fox Conference

Kevin Ragsdale, FoxForward “Best Presenter” winner, is running for congress.  His top priority just happens to be my top priority for this election: our budget crisis.

I’ll be keeping my eye out to see what Kevin’s stance is on the Fair Tax legislation.  There’s nothing like bringing Trillions of dollars back into the US economy and giving power back to the people, like the Fair Tax.

Good luck Kevin!!!  Give ‘em heck!

I am very proud of FoxForward, and I am awe struck by the talented speakers that presented at the conference. I also learned a lot from the attendees as well. They came from all walks of life, and with a variety of backgrounds and experiences.

Unfortunately the toll that the conference took on by business and personal life was too great. The conference took over one months full time effort. For a small business, and a father of two home schooled boys, I just couldn’t justify the loss of income for the effort.

Another aspect is that FoxForward 2007 wasn’t significantly larger than FoxForward 2006. I must admit it was a bit disappointing. I guess that the “diverse” technological topics aren’t of that much interest, as I thought it would be. Okay, enough reflection.

I am pleased to see some very positive announcements for the VFP community. FoxRockx has been announced and is shipping. I expect every one of you to subscribe. VFPx continues to impress! The people involved are cranking out some extremely impressive stuff. Check it out. And of course, SW Fox is bigger and better than evar!

So, even if there isn’t going to be a VFP 10, the Fox development team has enabled us to control our own future. If we work hard, support our community, and take ownership of Visual Foxpro and it’s future, we’ll be able to keep doing what we love to do long into the future!

Very funny Doug!!!  LOL!