Visual FoxPro

Visual FoxPro is a data centric, procedural programming language with object oriented programming features, combined with its own integrated development environment and a built in relational database engine. It traces back to FoxPro, a product first developed by Fox Software beginning in 1984, itself derived from the xBase family of languages that also includes dBase and Clipper. Microsoft acquired Fox Software through a 1992 merger and continued the product line, releasing Visual FoxPro 3.0 in June 1995 as the first version carrying the Visual name and a substantially modernized, Windows native development environment. Visual FoxPro supports procedural, object oriented and data centric styles of programming within a single environment, and it integrates SQL query capabilities directly alongside its native xBase style procedural commands, letting a developer manipulate its own database tables either through structured queries or through direct procedural code. This combination of a programming language, an IDE and a database engine in one product made Visual FoxPro popular for building small and medium sized business database applications during the 1990s and 2000s. Microsoft released the final version, 9.0, in December 2004, followed by a Service Pack 2 update in October 2007, and the company discontinued further development of the product in 2007, with mainstream support ending in January 2015.