Microsoft Visual FoxPro, the latest version being 9.0, is an object-oriented relational database management system. With the help of this database management system, we can create web-based database solutions for the desktop. It’s powerful data handling system and quick application development tools helps us in building all types of database solutions.
This new release of Visual FoxPro includes many new and enhanced features like the revised Report System, extended SQL capabilities and addition of new fields and data types such as ‘varchar’, ‘varbinary’, ‘blob’. With the introduction of CAST() Function, it has now become possible for you to create SQL server compatible SQL statements. Using this CAST() function, you can now convert expressions from one data type to another. Certain limitations that existed with the previous version have been removed in this new release of Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0. The SELECT – SQL command limitations now no longer exists. The new enhancements have actually made it more flexibility in subqueries - Visual FoxPro 9.0 now supports multiple subqueries. New features have been added to classes, forms, controls and object-oriented related syntax also. You can now prevent loading of unwanted dynamic-link library (.dll) files that affects the performance. This is possible as this new version of Microsoft Visual FoxPro automatically includes support for applications that are generated by the build process which detect whether they are running on a Terminal Server and prevent loading of unnecessary loading of .dll files. Moreover, the improved functionality for the IDE now provides a development environment for your projects and applications which is more integrated. Another enhancement which is actually worth mentioning is that you can now specify arrays containing more than 65000 elements, for example, say when using the DIMENSION command. But make sure that your computer memory is enough to accommodate the upper limits of your arrays.
There can be some behavioral changes as Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0 includes certain functionalities that differ from the previous versions. This might affect the existing code while running under this new version of Visual FoxPro. You must also make a note of the list of new words that have been added to the Visual FoxPro 9.0 language and which are now reserved as a result. Certain important things that should be kept in mind before downloading Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0, the latest update being Service pack 2 are;
1) The operating systems supported by Visual FoxPro 9.0 are Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2, Windows Vista and Windows XP Service Pack 2.
2) You must have Visual FoxPro 9.0 or Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP1 preinstalled in your system.
3) Make sure to uninstall CTP or Beta versions of SP2 before installing the final release.
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