Macrosoft is a leader in providing professional technical services for both ongoing support of Visual FoxPro applications and migration to modern technology platforms. As a result of this expertise, Macrosoft conducted an industry best practices survey during March 2021. 366 individuals participated in the 21-question on-line survey. Based on the broad participation it is believed that the results are highly accurate and represent a significant portion of the industry.
Survey results show an industry in flux, with sharp opinion differences concerning the role of VFP applications in the present technology world.
From the very beginning of its life, VFP has always had its strong proponents because of its tremendous power and flexibility as an application programming language. Even now 20 years later, facing significant end-of-life challenges, and with other key technologies moving forward around it, we still see in survey results participants who view VFP as the language/platform of choice.
Macrosoft plans to conduct this survey on an annual basis, which will bring new context to the responses as we see how the survey responses evolve over time.
Select Survey Findings
- 69% of respondents indicate their application is used externally by clients or by both internal and external clients with only 31% indicating the application is used entirely in house. It is clear VFP is still being widely used by many clients in all industries.
- About half of participants identified significant application risk in four areas:
- Incompatibility with operating system.
- System breaking for users.
- Being an unsupported platform.
- Security of the system.
- “Being able to work in the cloud”, was rated by 61% of respondents as a most or somewhat important factor driving the probability of an application migration.
- 21% of companies using a VFP application have migrated the data out of the FoxPro database. Likely precipitated by security concerns associated with protecting the VFP system’s underlying data.
- 15% of companies that began a migration abandoned the process before completion. It is a major undertaking that takes excellent knowhow and best practices with incremental development resources.
- Survey participants were asked what their ideal target development platform is for a new migrated application. Roughly a third each indicated:
- 31% Java
- 28% Open-Source
- 27% Microsoft .NET
The complete report download, and an interactive reporting portal can be found at www.migrateto.net/survey
Macrosoft is available to provide an industry expert who can present these results as requested to industry user groups.
Direct Questions about this survey and request for speaking engagements to
John Kullmann
VP, Technical Solutions
Macrosoft, Inc