By Imran Salahuddin | February 16th, 2021 |
Visual FoxPro’s end of life does not mean the end of your business. What it does mean though is a new way of life for your business. Translating your VFP applications to .NET environment should be handled carefully as there are chances of some pitfalls.
The phasing out of Visual FoxPro may impact your business if you do not necessary steps to migrate to .NET environment. As the support for VFP ends with an announcement from Microsoft, it is not advisable to continue with the outdated technology for your business-critical applications. It is important for each person and staff involved in your business should be clear with their role and update with necessary changes. The application needs to be migrated to the .NET environment and each functionality should be thoroughly verified to the requirements. You should be clear with your goals and requirements related to VFP migration.
In our research, the phasing out of Visual FoxPro will often address huge pain-points of the present system, whether for sales, customers, administrators, or support staff. There are things every company should focus on when it comes to Visual FoxPro end of life are:
After documenting raw numbers to show the size of the project, you should consider the project’s technical difficulty. Case in point, a project using VFP data settings with remote views to a SQL Server database in all its measures will be easier to translate to .NET than one that opens local tables indiscriminately throughout the code.
As with metrics, a clear agenda helps give your mission insight and lucidity. Schedules will vary with project objectives, limitations, and philosophies. Now, the schedule is not a timeline with deadlines and mileposts. Rather, it purposes as a plan that you can connect and monitor, providing the administration with status and insight into the development.
Visual FoxPro has now become an outdated technology, and this urges the need for many companies running their mission-critical applications to migrate to the stable .NET environment. If you are a consultant familiar with VFP to .NET migration projects, it is important for you to specify the deadlines for the applications running in VFP.
Understanding the current standing of your services and products makes sure that the conversion effort produces maximum business sense. Documentation will help everyone from the management, non-technical team members, and the technical team to have a common document to understand and the migration process. Documenting the existing application also gives everyone a range of metrics such as PRGs, SCXs, and FRXs.
If the existing products and services are an interfaced multiplication program, then it is essential to chart a migration strategy that minimizes quality issues and any possible downtimes in the future. For example, if the existing application uses DBFs to store data, then the database must be coded and modified to work with SQL as DBFs do not support any .Net programs. Especially in multi-application migrations, beginning the conversation from the database can accelerate the entire VFP modernization process.
Depending on the goals of the VFP modernization and the types of program, there will be multiple conversion options available. There will simple conversion such as from DBFs to SQL servers to coding a new architecture. Some of the possible conversions are –
The migration process from Visual FoxPro applications to .NET is not a simple uninstallation and installation. There needs to a coordinated effort from multiple talents, migrations need developers who can code as .Net does not support DLLs instead they need to code new objects, they also need to code newt ActiveX controls and COM objects as well. Coders have their hands full with converting code environment and the codes themselves. One of the easiest and part of the VFP modernization is the addition of new visual elements, this is a chance to make the applications more user-friendly and intuitive. The testing process of the migration will be a long and drawn-out one, it begins on day one and continues until the VFP modernization is finished and then some. As mentioned before, while the database will be the first to be migrated, the database will be fine-tuned to the last day to get the desired output. So, contact us, with our migration teams consisting of developers, software testers, designers, and project managers we will ensure you are on the right path when your products may be futile when it is FoxPro’s end of life.
To learn more about Visual FoxPro end of life, watch our video blog!
