Hi all,
I am Johan Nel from South Africa. My Xbase career started off in Dbase III+ way back in 1986. In 1987 I discovered Clipper Summer 87, and here I am due to that root. Clipper 5.0 came along and we were happy with the implemented crude version of "OpenSource". The XBase commands were demystified and we all knew exactly what was called under the hood to make USE (DbCloseArea), USE <dbf> (DbUseArea), etc. happen, and the first Classes was part of the language e.g. TBrowse and we all oTB:Skip[ping]() happily through our DBF data interface implementations. The Class implementation details was published and soon we were quite Class(y) with our OOP Clipper programs. Life was good...
During the the last NT-Clipper DevCon (1992) in SA, we saw the first of Aspen, codename for Clipper for Windows. Then a bombshell was dropped... MicroSoft purchases FoxPro... We should not be worried, Nantucket will keep on supporting Clipper and ensure it stays ahead of the Xbase pack... Computer Associates CA-Clipper 5.3 TechniCon was held the following year... It seems we safe... Then the industry started changing, Delphi came along, Visual-Basic, MS-Access and CA-Visual Objects were a nightmare to work with. I stuck it out with Clipper till 2000 when I finally moved to VO 2.3, the newsgroups indicated it is stable. Robert came along on the Development team when CA licensed VO maintenance to Grafx, it became almost like the Clipper days, except we did not had any conferences anymore... Only a few Clipper heads left in SA. I kept my loyalty, went onto Vulcan.NET (2009) and here I am, a X# developer with reasonable knowledge of Xbase programming in .NET.
When the announcement was made that X# will start working on support for the FoxPro language syntax, I started a "self" initiated project browsing the VFP forums and tell them there is hope... It worked, I have a community "DevTeam" going, we transfer our knowledge (VFP<->X#), write small applications to hopefully assist VFP users to make a transition as smooth as possible. A small team dedicated to make X# work with first hand knowledge of VFP and X#.
So when you reach this forum and read these messages. Know we are here to support you with our knowledge base of VFP and X#. Make use of it, and soon you will be able to provide support in the X# Core (general) forums.
A warm and happy welcome to all VFP members joining, I am sure you will feel the warmth we always had.
Happy X#ing the XBase.NET wave!