FoxPro Interop: Revisiting Modern .NET for the FoxPro Interop Developer

This was presented by Rick Strahl at Virtual Fox Fest 2022 (October): https://virtualfoxfest.com

If you're building modern applications that need to interface with various system or operating system features, you'll likely need external functionality that isn't available natively in FoxPro. Whatever your needs are, you can probably find this functionality in .NET either via built-in features, or by way of open source or third party libraries. With the wwDotnetBridge Interop library you can access most features directly, or you can build small .NET components that often make those interfaces easier to use.

While wwDotnetBridge can directly call .NET code, if your code requires a number of calls or accesses complex types it's often much easier to create a small wrapper library in .NET and call that from your FoxPro code.

In this session you'll learn how you can easily create small .NET components and use them from your FoxPro code, using both new lightweight tools like Visual Studio Code to create, build and run your code from the command line, as well as using full development IDEs like Visual Studio or Rider to build, debug and test .NET code and then call it from your FoxPro application. You'll find out about useful tools like LINQPad to quickly experiment with .NET code, and decompilers like Reflector, ILSpy, DotPeek and JustDecompile to examine API signatures so you know what's available to call for your FoxPro code.