Foxpro App Syndrome
Wednesday, 2. November 2005, 01:01:41
This was a recent exchange I had with Rick Schummer about how misinformed customers are about foxpro. For the full blog visit Ricks's site here
In a nutshell - Foxpro App Syndrome is a situation where a company is using a homegrown in-house application. Usually this application does not have a name. It still has VFP icons all over it. Sometimes it isn't even compiled so they run it as an app or prg.
These users all think their one application is "Foxpro". Any flaws in the application are flaws in "Foxpro". Invariably because of the years of spaghetti coding and the bugs that go along with it these users have concluded - "Foxpro Sucks!".
I have spent the last few years building shrink-wrap software, not consulting for IT departments, so I had almost blocked this phenomena from my mind.
I believe one cause (of Foxpro App Syndrome) is that often the last thing seen when a foxpro app crashes is “Cannot Quit Visual Foxpro”. I am not sure why the Fox engineers feel a need to advertise that an App was written in VFP at the applications worst moment. I don’t recall ever seeing a similar message for VB or Delphi – though I have seen C++ advertise its runtime errors. Most people have no clue when an app was written in C++, Delphi, VB etc. In foxpro the brand name whether in a caption, a msgbox, or the fox icon, somehow ends up getting displayed to the user, forever linking VFP with a bad user experience.
Three years ago one of my clients (a multi-millionaire from his fox 2.5 app) was cursing up a storm at a bug he was encountering in his app – foxpro sucks etc. I asked him if he could travel back in time 16 years what would he have used instead? He didn’t have an answer.
Foxpro is a victim of its own success. I personally know of at least three multi-million dollar companies that run their entire business on 15 year old fox 2.5 dos apps. You don’t see many 10 year old VB programs still running in production. When the fox apps start to encounter issues from running in Windows XP or because they have hit their data limit, rather than migrate the app to VFP/MySQL the developers come up with some ridiculously convoluted table structure. Evidently FoxPro is to blame – not the sloppy developer.
At 1:40 AM, Rick Schummer said...
Shawn, "Cannot Quit Visual FoxPro" can be removed simply using ON SHUTDOWN. My users have never seen this and I doubt my clients would know VFP 9 is under the hood if I did not tell them. It is not something I hide from my clients and it is not something I am ashamed of, or something I have to fight over with my customers.
I am proud to tell my clients that their app is powered by VFP. It just cracks me up when they refer to the app as FoxPro instead of the application name (Shawns comment: This doesn't crack me up at all. If Foxpro ever does "die" this may well be the reason).
Thinking about "VFP" text showing in one of my custom apps...I believe the last built in item I remember seeing was the "Visual FoxPro" in the report spooler when printing a report. I think the Fox Team removed this in VFP 7.
If you have specific examples share them with Microsoft. I am sure they would be interested in correcting any oversights.
At 2:21 PM, Shawn White said...
Hi Rick, I agree with you. I also am aware that the fox branding can be disabled - though many legacy apps have not done this. I am proud to work in VFP, I didn't intend to imply otherwise. I was just trying to say that a crash is not the best moment to inform your users what language you use. Historically (perhaps not now) this has been one of the reasons why users think that their custom application (the one they hate) is synonymous with VFP as a whole.
In a nutshell - Foxpro App Syndrome is a situation where a company is using a homegrown in-house application. Usually this application does not have a name. It still has VFP icons all over it. Sometimes it isn't even compiled so they run it as an app or prg.
These users all think their one application is "Foxpro". Any flaws in the application are flaws in "Foxpro". Invariably because of the years of spaghetti coding and the bugs that go along with it these users have concluded - "Foxpro Sucks!".
I have spent the last few years building shrink-wrap software, not consulting for IT departments, so I had almost blocked this phenomena from my mind.
I believe one cause (of Foxpro App Syndrome) is that often the last thing seen when a foxpro app crashes is “Cannot Quit Visual Foxpro”. I am not sure why the Fox engineers feel a need to advertise that an App was written in VFP at the applications worst moment. I don’t recall ever seeing a similar message for VB or Delphi – though I have seen C++ advertise its runtime errors. Most people have no clue when an app was written in C++, Delphi, VB etc. In foxpro the brand name whether in a caption, a msgbox, or the fox icon, somehow ends up getting displayed to the user, forever linking VFP with a bad user experience.
Three years ago one of my clients (a multi-millionaire from his fox 2.5 app) was cursing up a storm at a bug he was encountering in his app – foxpro sucks etc. I asked him if he could travel back in time 16 years what would he have used instead? He didn’t have an answer.
Foxpro is a victim of its own success. I personally know of at least three multi-million dollar companies that run their entire business on 15 year old fox 2.5 dos apps. You don’t see many 10 year old VB programs still running in production. When the fox apps start to encounter issues from running in Windows XP or because they have hit their data limit, rather than migrate the app to VFP/MySQL the developers come up with some ridiculously convoluted table structure. Evidently FoxPro is to blame – not the sloppy developer.
At 1:40 AM, Rick Schummer said...
Shawn, "Cannot Quit Visual FoxPro" can be removed simply using ON SHUTDOWN. My users have never seen this and I doubt my clients would know VFP 9 is under the hood if I did not tell them. It is not something I hide from my clients and it is not something I am ashamed of, or something I have to fight over with my customers.
I am proud to tell my clients that their app is powered by VFP. It just cracks me up when they refer to the app as FoxPro instead of the application name (Shawns comment: This doesn't crack me up at all. If Foxpro ever does "die" this may well be the reason).
Thinking about "VFP" text showing in one of my custom apps...I believe the last built in item I remember seeing was the "Visual FoxPro" in the report spooler when printing a report. I think the Fox Team removed this in VFP 7.
If you have specific examples share them with Microsoft. I am sure they would be interested in correcting any oversights.
At 2:21 PM, Shawn White said...
Hi Rick, I agree with you. I also am aware that the fox branding can be disabled - though many legacy apps have not done this. I am proud to work in VFP, I didn't intend to imply otherwise. I was just trying to say that a crash is not the best moment to inform your users what language you use. Historically (perhaps not now) this has been one of the reasons why users think that their custom application (the one they hate) is synonymous with VFP as a whole.
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