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

CodeCast Episodes 1 – 102:

#	Episode
102	Surface 2.0 with Dr. Neil Roodyn
101	History of Microsoft with Stuart Johnston
100	2010 Year in Review
99	Workflow 4 and AppFabric with Maurice de Beijer
98	Technical Resources for .NET Developers
97	Microsoft Tag with Didier Caron
96	Cloud Computing with Remi Caron
95	LightSwitch Scenarios with Beth Massi
94	PDC 2010 Summary – Silverlight, Azure, Async for C#/VB
93	Xamalot.com – Free XAML Resources for WPF and Silverlight
92	Windows Live Essentials 2011 with Kip Kniskern of LiveSide.net
91	Servoy Development Suite with Sean Devlin
90	Surface and Multi-Touch UI with Dr. Neil Roodyn
89	Windows 7 Development with Ritscher and Wildermuth
88	LightSwitch for .NET Developers with Jay Schmelzer
87	PostSharp for VS with Gael Fraiteur
86	News on Mobile Devices, WebMatrix and Razor
85	Cool Apps, Utilities, and Tips for Windows, Mac, and iOS
84	IronPython 2.6.1 for VS 2010 with Jimmy Schementi
83	10 Years of CODE Magazine with Markus Egger and Rod Paddock
82	INETA.org with Mike Vincent
81	CodeRush for VS 2010 with Gary Short
80	VS 2010 and Office 2010 Development with Beth Massi
79	VS 2010 Shell Products with Nathan Halstead
78	iPad for Developers, iPhone OS 4
77	State of .NET – Spring 2010
76	PowerShell for Developers with Ed Wilson
75	Visual Studio Tips with Zain Naboulsi
74	MIX10 News on WinPhone7, Silverlight 4, and IE 9
73	F# with Michael Hale
72	VS 2010 Start Page Customization with Adrian Collier
71	Microsoft MVP Summit and Windows Phone 7 Series
70	Code Camp with Chris Kinsman and Walt Ritscher
69	Virtual Brown Bag Meetings with Claudio Lassala
68	Convention over Configuration, AOP with JB
67	VS 2010 IDE Shell with Weston Hutchins
66	SOLID with Claudio Lassala
65	iPad, Tablet/Slate/Netbook PCs, Kindle
64	MSBuild with Chuck England
63	2009 Year in Review
62	GiveCamp with Chris Koenig
61	RIA Services with Silverlight and more
60	Visual Studio 2010 editor with Chris Granger
59	VS 2010 SDK and Extension Manager with Quan To
58	msdn.com content and strategy with Kerby Kuykendall
57	Expression for WPF and Silverlight
56	Videos on msdn.com with Jeremy Kelley
55	TechEd Europe 2009 Review and Silverlight 4
54	PDC 2009 Review
53	UML, VS 2010, .NET 4.0 with Kevin McNeish
52	Windows 7 for Developers
51	Software Project Management with Mike Yeager
50	Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 with Doug Seven
49	Using Code Templates and Refactoring with Visual Studio
48	iPhone Development for .NET Developers
47	WPF and Silverlight with Walt Ritscher
46	Upcoming Microsoft PDC
45	Development Constraints with CSS, HTML, HTML 5
44	Virtualization with Brain Randell
43	Real-time vs. Cached Search, CODE in Kindle Format
42	Project Complexity, Snow Leopard, CODE Mag on Kindle
41	Windows Live and Live Services with James Senior
40	Developer Methodologies, Windows Live, and Tech News
39	CodePlex with Sara Ford
38	Windows 7 for Devs, Digital Software Purchases
37	ASP.NET MVC with guest Rick Strahl
36	Chrome OS, eBooks with guest Rick Strahl
35	TechEd Aus/NZ and Field Evangelists with Andrew Coates
34	Surface, Win7 Multi-Touch, iPhone SDK with Dr. Neil Roodyn
33	Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend
32	Roadmap for VB, C#, and F# with Luca Bolognese
31	Google Wave, Apple, Bing.com with Ken Levy and Gary Short
30	CodeRush Xpress with Gary Short
29	Dynamic Language Features in C# 4.0 with Alexandru Ghiondea
28	Adding Features to C# and VB Compilers with Sam Ng
27	Extensible Start Page in Visual Studio 2010 with Noah Coad
26	IronRuby with Jimmy Schementi
25	Advanced .NET Programming with Eric Lippert
24	MDSN Forums and msdn.com with Jeremy Kelley
23	VS 2010 Extension Manager and Visual Studio Gallery
22	F# with Chris Smith
21	.NET, Java, Oracle-Sun, New IT Cold War with Ted Neward
20	Biz Apps Team and VB with Beth Massi
19	Windows Mobile Dev Community with Constanze Roman
18	IronPython and Dynamic Languages with Harry Pierson
17	Visual Basic 2010 with Lisa Feigenbaum
16	MVPs and Connected Systems Community with Ed Hickey
15	Oslo and M with Paul Vick
14	Expression and MDSN Developer and Design Centers
13	IronPython and Dynamic Languages
12	Visual Basic and the VB Community
11	REST and jQuery
10	DevExpress – CodeRush, Refactor!, and DXCore
9	2008 Year in Review
8	Rod Paddock – Editor-In-Chief of CoDe Magazine
7	Twitter, F#, WPF, Surface
6	PEX, Twitter, AJAX
5	VSX, VSIP, Aggiorno, DBI-Tech Controls
4	State of .NET, IE8, ASP.NET MVC, and O’Reilly Media
3	PDC, C#, IE8, and Surface
2	Live from PDC 2008
1	The Pilot

]]> http://mashupx.com/blog/2011/02/12/codecast-episodes-1-102/feed/ 0 http://mashupx.com/blog/2010/12/09/visual-foxpro-strategy-at-microsoft/ http://mashupx.com/blog/2010/12/09/visual-foxpro-strategy-at-microsoft/#comments Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:40:51 +0000 Ken Levy http://mashupx.com/blog/2010/12/09/visual-foxpro-strategy-at-microsoft/ 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.

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.

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/.