Why Modernize Your VFP?

It can be fascinating to replace an existing application that is critical to any business operations that is no longer sustainable. But in reality, not every software project that gets replaced involves an exciting new product build.

Why? These projects can seem flashy in the beginning, but in most cases, they do not offer any assurance of augmenting the revenue in a short term.

They just pose critical to the business.

In recent days, we’ve encountered many clients, who are of the opinion to replace their Visual FoxPro app. If you find yourself in that position, here is a post for you from our expert visual FoxPro consulting Houston team. To be honest, our visual FoxPro consulting team has done a lot of brainstorming before presenting to you the big picture of today’s dying technology, Visual FoxPro, which was once a part of growing technologies in almost every single industry.

All About Visual FoxPro Visual FoxPro (VFP) is a programming language that gained much popularity among businesses during the early 90s. It is an info-centric and object-oriented computer language that was exclusively designed for Rapid application development (RAD) to focus more on data. In fact, it gained 12th place, in the TIOBE index as the most popular programming language.

It gained immense popularity among every visual FoxPro consultant for its flexibility and vigorous capacity to develop large databases. After Microsoft released the new version, Visual FoxPro 9, they announced their official cessation from the product.

Though Microsoft sacked support for Visual FoxPro more than seven years ago, still many businesses use it to keep their legacy systems running. This is because of Visual FoxPro’s ability to couple with a relational database.

Why Should You Modernize Your VFP Application And Not Migrate?

After witnessing Microsoft’s cessation from VFP, it might be tempting to migrate your FoxPro application to a modern platform. Indeed it would be the most exciting thing to do if there was a viable solution to automatically do that. However, the expert visual FoxPro consulting teams say that there is no such option as such. The automation techniques available in the market simply perform the code-generation task, while pushing you to clear up the mess, for which you might have to learn .NET in the process.

Another reason stated by the visual FoxPro consulting Houston experts is that businesses will be forced to hire expensive consulting to rewrite and deploy the new application. Most times, these new applications consist of complex business logic, where the business might possess the inadequate in-house capability.

Modernize Your VFP Application

Modernization of any application is going to be an expensive affair. So, the visual FoxPro consultant asks not to migrate unless your business has a lot of time, energy, and money to spend. However there might be compelling situations to cope with rich UI, ability to integrate with different platforms or cloud services providers, in such cases, it is recommended to modernize your Visual FoxPro application.

Modernizing the application, will 

Save your costs on terminal services licensing or redundant hardware systems

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Cost savings for on-premises deployments

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Greater delta between the old and new applications

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Comes with the integrated database engine

Suggestions on Modernizing Your FoxPro Application

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The visual FoxPro consulting experts recommend using remote desktop or terminal services to deploy the application, as it will eliminate the risk of rebuilding it.

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Using a minimal viable product approach will help easy syncing to a SQL database.

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If your application has complex business logic, then the visual FoxPro consulting Houston team recommends considering an automated conversion.

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Leverage the help of the best visual FoxPro consultant as much as possible to avoid a DIY approach.

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Identify the commercially viable pieces first and avoid starting from the bottom up by migrating your DBF database.

Choose the Right Partner Always keep in mind to do what’s best for your company. This might benefit the developers in your team, to add up skills on their resume, however, it might cost your company in terms of productivity and the wait time to market. Also, there might be great companies that offer visual FoxPro consulting out there, but we recommend you select the

right technology partner for your VFP modernization project based on the following key attributes – 

Significant experience

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Ability to handle VFP modernization projects

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Proven expertise with Visual FoxPro

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Strong consultant mentality the mixture of these attributes will upsurge the chances of success of your business on the technical level and project execution levels. Moreover, it will help save on your costs and realize additional returns on your investment.