On Thursday 22 October I present FoxAgent at Virtual Fox Fest 2026, the online conference of the Visual FoxPro community run by Tamar Granor, Rick Schummer and Doug Hennig. The session is called FoxAgent: Connecting AI Agents to Live VFP Applications with X# and MCP.
| Time | |
|---|---|
| New York (EDT) | 11:30 to 12:45 |
| Central Europe (CEST) | 17:30 to 18:45 |
It is the first session on Thursday. When it ends I move to the Q&A room the organizers set up, for about fifteen more minutes.
Where it comes from
The talk starts where the project started: with a support call. Getting into the customer’s machine has never been hard, that is what AnyDesk or RustDesk are for. The hard part comes after, when I need to know what the application is doing right now and my tools are reading a log, adding a MESSAGEBOX with a variable, recompiling and trying again, with the customer watching.
All of that state is inside VFP: the variables, the cursors, the open forms, the call stack. VFP answers any question you ask it. FoxAgent is the way for an AI agent to ask.
What I’ll cover
The first half explains how it is built, with technology any VFP developer already knows:
- What MCP is, the protocol AI agents use to call tools, and what a complete call looks like.
- The three pieces of FoxAgent (Broker, Bridge and McpHost), how they talk over COM and named pipes, and why the Bridge is written in X#.
- The role model: the application decides how far the agent can go, user by user, and an elevated permission expires by itself.
- How to write a business tool of your own, which is an ordinary VFP class.
The second half is a live demo on FoxMart, a small point of sale I wrote for the talk, with real tables, forms and reports and one real bug. The agent finds the application and reads the screen, makes a sale through FoxMart’s own forms, gets refused until a technician signs in, tracks the bug down in the data and the source code, and finally gains a new tool written in a few minutes.
I close with a block on using AI responsibly: where the training data for these models came from, what each query costs, and what FoxAgent does about it.
If you are attending
Attendees get the FoxMart source, the white paper and a courtesy FoxAgent license valid until the end of January with the session materials, so they can repeat the demo on their own machine without signing up anywhere. The installer for that version is at irwinrodriguez.dev/vff.
Registration is at virtualfoxfest.com. If you can’t make it, the FoxAgent page and its documentation cover the same ground at a slower pace.
Thanks to Tamar, Rick and Doug for accepting the proposal, and to Fabrice Foray and the X# team for introducing me to them.