software development, windows

Microsoft urges FoxPro, Delphi developers to move to .NET

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Here at Microsoft’s Tech-Ed in Barcelona two forthcoming sessions caught my eye. Tomorrow afternoon there is a discussion on “Moving from Visual FoxPro to .NET”. From the abstract:

Looking forward to Vista, .NET is a pragmatic necessity for VFP developers. How will you deal with Vista clients? What will you do? How long can you remain in VFP? How can you move to .NET with the least impact?

On Wednesday it’s Delphi developers who get told there is no future in their programming platform, in “Moving from Delphi to .NET”:

Even if you are not considering .NET now, at some point you will have to move to .NET with new code, or to port existing code. Staying with Win32 may be viable in the short term, but not the long term.

By accident or design, the session conflicts with one from the  father of Delphi, Anders Hejlsberg, on C# 3.0, the next generation of Microsoft’s home-grown programming language.

I’d like to attend both events, if only to discover whether there are really a bunch of FoxPro and Delphi pros here at Tech-Ed, puzzling over how to migrate to .NET. Alternatively, maybe some of them could mount a robust defence of these older tools. After all, there’s no sign of Win32 or COM going away any time soon, though .NET refuseniks may have a bit of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) envy. Then again, look what language is riding high in the Computer Language Shootout Scorecard.

2 thoughts on “Microsoft urges FoxPro, Delphi developers to move to .NET”

  1. If you are interested in shootouts, have a look at. a Linux only shootout that is kept up to date:

    new shootout

    Note the place of say Mono relative to FPC. (FPC is roughly equal to Delphi in speed magnitude by own unscientific benchmarks nowadays, another major version down the line from your shootout URL).

    The native compiler get the top marks. Functional languages also perform quite well (probably the relatively small benchmarks with a lot of math and recursion)

  2. Tim wrote “Then again, look what language is riding high in the Computer Language Shootout Scorecard.”

    That should be – look what language is riding high in The Great Win32 Computer Language Shootout, which afaict hasn’t been updated since June 2003.

    Marco wrote “Note the place of say Mono relative to FPC.”
    It would be quite a mistake to confuse the performance of Mono on Linux with the likely performance of .Net on MS Windows.

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