Ken Levy's Blog

Since the launch of the CodeCast podcast (the late night show for .NET developers) in October 2008 at PDC, I’ve co-hosted (with Markus Egger and Gary Short) and edited/produced 102 shows. CodeCast is associated by CODE Magazine (EPS Software).

Website: http://codemag.com/codecast
Twitter: @CodeCast

CodeCast Episodes 1 – 102:

The purchase of Fox Software for $173 million in 1992 was very strategic for Microsoft, and was the biggest corporate purchase Microsoft had ever made up until that time. Borland had purchased Aston-Tate’s which included dBase III and IV, and had Paradox. And growing in popularity at the time was PowerBuilder as the king of client/server tools, with Sybase releasing PowerBuilder 12 last year ironically based on the free Visual Studio Shell runtime. Microsoft needed three things from the Fox Software deal – the Fox developer team, the Fox technology, and the customer market share of FoxPro/FoxBase. Microsoft was just starting work on Access and it was more targeting power users, but there was still some overlap. Visual Basic was still in its early days.

There was an estimated 500,000 FoxPro developers at the peak around 1995, and millions of computers with FoxPro apps running (either DOS or Windows based). It took almost 4 years, not until after VFP 5.0, for Microsoft to focus more strategy around VB and less for VFP. Basically, the VFP customer base and sales went from increasing to decreasing, as the saying goes in business: if you aren’t growing, you’re dying. In the initial years after the Fox Software merger, Microsoft put a huge effort and lots of resources into creating VFP 3.0. There were about 50 people on the Fox team with a big marketing budget. In the following years, both Access and VB grew in market share and also competed in ways with the VFP market (and messaging), and by the time VFP 5.0 was released, many upper managers wanted Microsoft to just end VFP there. In fact, they did for a short time. I was there, in a meeting with 40 people, and the formal announcement was made to the Fox team that VFP was dead. It was very early 1996, and that meeting lead to the Gartner Group releasing their report that VFP was dead, which had a major impact on future VFP sales. But the Fox team members along with the community helped convince the developer tools management to keep VFP evolving while decreasing the resources. In fact, the primary reason VFP lasted another decade with 4 more versions released was more about Windows sales than VFP sales. There are many Windows machines running VFP apps. When Steve Ballmer jumps around like monkey boy and yells "developers, developers, developers", he’s thinking about selling Windows and Office more than sales of developer tools.

For each new version of VFP like 6.0 and 7.0, there were less resources, team members, and marketing budget. When VFP was included the Visual Studio box, it was just a bundle, no integration. When the VFP community saw VFP running inside Visual Studio and the possibility of running on the .NET framework, they also learned that if VFP went that path, it would seriously break FoxPro code backward compatibility and the VFP IDE would be gone eventually. Microsoft never had a goal to work on both VFP stand-alone and VFP for .NET. Having a new VFP for .NET would just take away resources from evolving VB.NET and C#, make it harder to sell Visual Studio and the .NET framework, and not really result in anything useful since it would not run old VFP code as-is. Then after VFP 7.0, it was decided to keep VFP as a stand-alone product outside of the Visual Studio bundle, since it would not be part of the .NET platform. This made sense, and allowed VFP to ship on its own new version timeline. Each new version released, it was expected that was the last version. Nobody on the Fox team, not a single person, expected a version after VFP 8.0 released. Sales continued to decline annually, and so did the marketing budget.

The only way to grow/increase sales of VFP would have been to compete with Visual Studio and take away budget and resources from Visual Studio. In reality, the biggest competitor to VFP was Access, Visual Basic, and then Visual Studio (not Delphi or any non-Microsoft product). Most developer division marketing teams and management at Microsoft would have preferred Fox developers use Borland’s Delphi.NET rather than Microsoft VFP, since they would be building on the .NET platform rather than the old legacy COM. COM became the enemy, to move people away from it, just like HTML/JavaScript is a current enemy to the Microsoft platform today as well. For VFP 9.0, there were only about 10 people on the Fox team, and even so, VFP 9.0 was a better release than VFP 7.0 and VFP 8.0 according to the community. Soon after VFP 9.0 released, Microsoft decided to create an Xbase add-on to give away in order to maintain initial upgrade sales and an upbeat perception of VFP. The result was a plan for Sedna, a download of useful sample apps and utilities that focused on VFP interop with other Microsoft products (.NET, SQL Server, Office, Windows, etc.). The other reason for Sedna was to delay the announcement of the end of VFP in order to save sales of VFP 9.0 as well as to protect the Fox community and the job market for VFP developers.

In the final 5 years of Visual FoxPro at Microsoft, while I was the last Product Manager (marketing/ community) for VFP, the strategy was to market VFP to the existing community (mainly via upgrades), to do what was possible to keep the Fox community as strong, and to get VFP developers to adopt additional Microsoft products (.NET and SQL Server). In my role, I always viewed myself in 2 positions – one representing Microsoft as an employee, and the other as a FoxPro community member doing everything I could for Fox within the walls of Microsoft to evolve, save, promote, and help VFP and the community as much as possible. I spent nearly half of my time marketing VFP within Microsoft, at the Redmond headquarters and to the field offices, on messaging and keeping the VFP message positive/alive.

Management at Microsoft above the core Fox team were the decision makers for things related to VFP strategy. Nobody on the core Fox team had decision making ability around marketing budget or resources for the team, or what was done after each version shipped. There were a few key people on the team who, working together, probably extended the life of VFP an least one additional version and several years. I think the customer base loyalty was yet another factor in how long VFP was extended beyond 6.0. But by the time VFP 9.0 was released, the amount of sales for all versions of VFP combined annually was less revenue than Microsoft sales of Visual Studio in only one day. The cost to evolve VFP relative to the amount of money it generated (ROI) was far less than putting more resources into Visual Studio and .NET languages. Plus, some Fox team members were ready to move on or leave Microsoft, and it was nearly impossible to find qualified people to replace them. It helps to put this all into perspective if you think of Visual Studio as a competitive product to VFP, even though it was owned by the same company. Remember when Apple worked on both the Mac and the Lisa computers at the same time, only one survived. In the case of VFP, it survived an entire decade after it was essentially killed (by it no longer being strategic).

Microsoft will never release VFP source code into open source because, for Microsoft, there is no business reason to do so and a list of reasons not to. The request for Microsoft to make the Visual FoxPro code base open source is a common (and logical) one. Here is some insight to why Microsoft will never release Visual FoxPro source code into open source. There is technology in VFP, like Rushmore optimized indexing, that is used in other Microsoft products SQL Server and Access. It’s not the same/C++ codebase, but many techniques and algorithms originated from VFP. Microsoft considers this intellectual property, an asset Microsoft does not want to be released. But the two more significant reasons have nothing to do with the reason above. They have to do with business. While Microsoft is not focused on sales of VFP, it is focused on sales of Visual Studio and adoption of the overall Microsoft platform(stack of products and services). Releasing VFP into open source would result in less VFP developers using the current (modern) Microsoft platform of products, but may also result in someone or some company creating a competitive product against Microsoft. Microsoft would not want to see the code used to enhance a competitive product nor would they want to see a new product created that interferes with Visual Studio sales or .NET platform adoption.

On January 15th, 2010, VFP 9.0 standard support ended. While paid extended support will exist for 5 more years, I don’t expect any additional hotfixes or anything to be done for VFP, unless in the rare case it impacted VFP runtime on Windows 8 preventing customers with VFP based apps to upgrade to the latest version of Windows. Some suggest that Microsoft killed VFP before it should have, and another way to look at the behind the scenes history is to see that VFP lived many years and versions beyond what it was planned. While Microsoft could have done more for VFP, it just really couldn’t happen with Microsoft promoting and giving resources to Access, Visual Basic, and then Visual Studio at the same time. Only developers who have used FoxPro really appreciate it for what it was and still is.

Next week, September 15-16, Microsoft will host the first developer conference for VSX (Visual Studio Extensibility) open for anyone to attend (in the past it was for Microsoft partners only). The event is also referred to as VSX DevCon 2008, web site for the event: http://msdn.com/vsx/conference.

I will be attending the event, hosted by the VSX Team, the great group of people I use to work with at Microsoft (see just a few of them on the VSX team profile page).

Here are 10 of many great reasons to attend the event if you can:

1. The cost of registration for both full days of the event is only $100.
2. Developers always like to hear two words: free food.  Registration includes two days of breakfast and lunch. There will also be food at the Monday evening event Ask the Experts & Partner / Publisher Fair social gathering (where there will be more free stuff and giveaways).
3. All attendees receive free stuff including a free copy of the Wrox book Professional Visual Studio Extensibility, a $49.99 retail value (currently $31.49 via Amazon.com).
4. Receive a copy (or a second copy) of the first edition of VSX CoDe Focus magazine, published late last year which is a full 76 page issue of CoDe magazine dedicated to the topic of VSX. While the contents of the magazine all are online in HTML and PDF download at http://www.code-magazine.com/focus/vsx/ and in WPF format in the free Xiine client application, it’s cool to get a printed copy if you don’t already have one.
5. There will be several hundred in attendance at the event from around the world including developers who are VSX experts, some new to VSX, VSIP (Visual Studio Industry Partners) who create 3rd party products for Visual Studio, and many people from many Microsoft teams. Networking with others at the event will be worth the time aside from the great sessions, speakers, attendees, and Microsoft employees.
6. The event includes an excellent list of speakers including some of the key architects of Visual Studio, key members of teams who work on the VS platform and ecosystem, as well as some of the top experts from the VSX developer community. Refer to the Speakers page for a complete list of speakers and bios.
7. VSX DevCon 2008 also has amazing list of 24 VSX sessions of content over the two day event. See the detailed Sessions page for the specifics. The sessions are split into two tracks, intro and advanced. Refer to the Agenda page for the timeline details.
8. Not only can you learn about how to extend Visual Studio, but there will be lots of information about the cool Visual Studio Gallery website at http://visualstudiogallery.com. The site currently has over 700 listings including many free applications for Visual Studio as well as a many 3rd party VS products. For more information about the VS Gallery website, check out Mike Yeager’s CoDe magazine article Extending Your Development Experience with Visual Studio Gallery.
9. The keynote speaker is Rico Mariani who leads the team of architects in the VS division at Microsoft. Rico is an incredibly technical, educational, and entertaining presenter. Expect the keynote to include some information about the next version of Visual Studio (code named VS10, or Dev10 including other components like the .NET Framework) as a prelude to additional announcements at PDC next month. Important to VSX and the VS ecosystem is the future of extending Visual Studio within the VS roadmap plans at Microsoft.
10. VSX is a growing community with an increasing job market demand. This means that those VS/.NET developers who learn how to extend Visual Studio using the VS SDK will open the door to an increase of opportunity in their own development work/company, possibly get a better or expanded job that includes VSX development, or as a consultant find new clients and raise rates based in the increasingly high demand for VSX developer expertise. For more information about VSX in general, check out Istvan Novak’s CoDe magazine article Visual Studio Platform and Extensibility.

Video posted on Channel 9: Toby Richards: Community and MVP Program Roadmap (40 minutes).

In this video interview I did a few weeks ago (a few days before my last day at Microsoft), I talk to Toby Richards, General Manager for Community Support Services and the MVP Program at Microsoft. The interview includes discussions around the current state of the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professionals) community and the roadmap for the MVP program and the next MVP summit.

Toby took over this role in early 2008, and he is responsible for programs that identify, award and enable community influencers around the world, creating deeper relationships and richer feedback opportunities that improve Microsoft products and services. Also discussed in the interview is online support strategies and how MVPs help users and developers who are not MVPs.

This video is a kind of part 2 to the video interview I did last year with Sean O’Driscoll in the video Channel 9: Sean O’Driscoll, a General Manager for Community Support and the MVP Program. Sean, who will be leaving Microsoft later this year, was in the role Toby has now taken over. In that interview with Sean, we discussed  the history, current state, and future of Microsoft MVPs and the MVP Program. So the video interview with Sean is a good prequel to the Toby video sequel.

I was an MVP for much of the 1990s before joining Microsoft, and I was an MVP product group lead for both Visual FoxPro and Windows Live Developer groups, followed by mostly MVPs who made up the VSX Insider group. I’ve been involved with the MVP program and summits in some form since the mid 1990s, starting about a year or so after the MVP program started at Microsoft.I will be working with a variety of current MVPs in my new company (MashupX, LLC) ventures.

Thanks to Dan Fernandez for posting this video interview on Channel 9. For more information about the MVP Program, refer to http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/.