Business Impact and Risks associated with Microsoft Visual FoxPro

By Imran Salahuddin | Published on March 30th, 2021 | Last updated on January 24th, 2024 |

Risks You May Face as You Continue in FoxPro

Visual FoxPro was an excellent development tool throughout the 1990s or even in the 2000s but it has shown a continual decline with Microsoft announcing the end of support. Visual FoxPro 9 was released in 2007, virtually the stone-age, when it comes to the world of technology. This creates an element of risk for your organization that you need to take down and breakthrough to move forward today.

As Microsoft phased out Visual FoxPro, your mission-critical applications running on VFP pose significant risks. Moving to a stable platform that offers vendor support can help to mitigate these risks.

Watch John Kullmann,Macrosoft Inc. Vice President talks about the potential risks that might cost you badly in near future.

Some risks and impacts that companies face for continuing with Visual FoxPro are:

• The diminishing pool of resources in VFP should be considered seriously as developers want to work on new and interesting technologies as opposed to retired and outdated languages.
• For a growing company, they will find it hard to deploy desktop-based FoxPro onto many PCs.
• All companies are facing increased security requirements when it comes to customer and financial data. The Visual FoxPro could potentially leave open vulnerabilities going forward with no development patches available.
• Potential and abrupt changes are another risk for Visual FoxPro. Potential browser changes or application changes or third-party tools being used may no longer work if not updated.
• If you wish to have your service or product on smartphones, you have no choice to move forward without migrating.
• Visual FoxPro is restricted to a 32-bit operating system. Currently, there are workarounds but how long it will continue to work only time will tell.
• Visual FoxPro applications experience slowness in multi-user platforms with an increase in database sizes.
• Organizations will be limiting their innovative abilities; the IT landscape of 2021 are on a very different technological platform when compared with Visual FoxPro.
• Implementing new enhancements to improve user functionality touch screen capability or even mobile interface might not work with your Visual FoxPro application causing an opportunity to be lost.

Although Visual FoxPro served as a dynamic application development environment suited for 32-bit database applications and components, performance-wise VFP did not scale well to user demands. Future businesses demand applications that are portable and interoperable. Converting VFP applications requires considerable effort and expertise. You need an experienced migration team, having sound knowledge in VFP as well as the latest technologies, to make the transition smoothly and successfully.

Imran Salahuddin

VP of Technology & Migration Services at Macrosoft Inc

Imran serves as Macrosoft’s VP of Technology & Migration Services. With two decades of industry experience, Imran continues to demonstrate his ability to ensure seamless migrations. Imran works with Project Managers, sales/strategy teams, and clients to ensure the successful migration of legacy applications. Moreover, Imran exhibits effective communication skills and an eye for quality service.

As a Microsoft Certified and PMI Project Management Professional, Imran can migrate a myriad of difficult technologies. Most recently, he migrated a VFP legacy application which communicated to networking equipment. Testing the application without detailed knowledge of the domain was the real challenge.

Imran also dedicates his time to IoT (Internet of Things), as well as Online Sales, and looks to improve upon all of Macrosoft’s existing verticals.