VFPA, the way forward for VFP Lovers!

Some of us (including yours truly) finds it very hard to move away from VFP.  Not because I can’t learn a new language but the moment I started trying to learn a new one, my mind always compares the syntax with VFP which seems to be embedded already in my being.  So I always ended up with thoughts like “if it is done in VFP9, there are only fewer lines to do such!” or “Heck, why did they made it like this when in VFP9…”.  In the end I lose interest in the new language.  Not to mention that there really is no demand for me on said language.

Still, learning and knowing more than VFP is really beneficial to us as developers.  Anyway, finally I tried VFPA by Chuanbing Chen, basically because I want its protection against decompilation; of course at first with some inhibitions.  So I decided to try and use that for a new client.

The moment I realized that it actually does not overwrite the copy of my VFP9 SP2 and instead creates its own folder, I said to myself “Hey, this is great!  I can run both VFP9 and VFPA in a single machine and in case something goes wrong, I can simply reopen the project back to VFP9 and recompile there!”.  

So that was the plan!  A plan that never happened because I observed VFPA to be more stable than VFP9.  And that is not a surprise considering Chen has fixed a lot of bugs that remain with VFP9.   So since I started using VFPA, I never went back to VFP9 anymore.  And when my other client requested new enhancements on my existing app, I moved them as well to VFPA.

Right now, I am still using just VFPA-32 bit.  But Chen offers more than that such as VFPA-64 bit and VFPCompiler.

If you are interested in checking Chuanbing Chen’s VFPA in its original language, please click this link.  

If you want to read his site in English, you can use this link  

Also the list of Fixed VFP9 Bugs in VFPA:  

If you want to learn further about VFPA, you can view this video  

Anyway, the purpose of this entry here is to introduce VFP Advanced to my readers, if you still are not aware of it.  Personally?  Though I have just recently used VFPA, and by recently I mean since December 2020 only, I am very much satisfied with it.  As a parting words, move to VFPA.