Visual FoxPro is in the news again

Many of you know that the Donor Manager is written in Visual FoxPro, a wonderful database programming language by Microsoft.

These days, VFP seems a bit out of favor with Microsoft, who is pushing their also very nice Visual Studio.NET as their premier programming environment.

But, it is interesting to note that VFP is now rated higher that VB.NET in terms of programmer interest. Here is an interesting article on that. Be sure to read the comment at the end trying to explain why VFP made a huge jump in popularity in the past few months:

http://farm.tucows.com/blog/_archives/2006/4/17/1892314.html

VFP is truly a workhorse programming language.

What's coming ...

Once I get the Visual FoxPro 9 update done, then I hope to work on the personalize bulk email routine, and the "Donor Manager for Organizations" additions.

The organizations routines will add support for more fund ids, more reporting options, receipts and statements.

Oh, and more categorization options. The 10 user definable lists just are not enough for many people, so I'm thinking of how to expand that.

Oh, and multi-currency support is coming as well, but I'm not sure just how soon.

Version 5.36 posted

I posted version 5.36 the other day. I can't believe it's been in beta so long, but I work a little on it here, and a little there.

Finally, I figured, enough is enough. Let's get it out there for everyone besides the beta testers.

So far, it's gone pretty well. I've had the usual few bugs to get out that were not caught in the beta testing period, but not too many.

A bunch of new organizations have been added, and just today, I got request for 2 more.

These are generally pretty easy to add, although the WBT ones that come in an RTF file are really, really a challenge.

The next big leap, after getting this version launched is to make the switch to Visual FoxPro 9.

This will add nice screen resizing, plus a number of goodies to the programmer right away. It will require a big download for everyone, but it shouldn't be too bad.

I've already done a "trial run" of the upgrade process and it looks like I should be able to do it in just a day or two. Then, once that Fox 9 version is stable, I'll start adding goodies again.