A few days ago a colleague told me he wasn’t a millionaire, so he couldn’t buy everything I have on my website. That made me laugh, because if it took a millionaire to buy it, I’d be one by now. I answered that he hadn’t looked closely at my products, because a good part of what is here isn’t sold. Later I thought that, exaggeration aside, if he came away with that impression, other people will too, and that it is partly my fault: the pricing page is easy to find, while the free things are spread across product pages and blog posts.
So here it all is in one place. I publish the free things for two reasons. One is that I have been sharing VFP code since 2019 and I haven’t stopped. The other is that the free tools are also the way in to what I sell, because I have to make a living somehow.
Open source libraries
These are libraries for VFP 9 under the MIT license. The code is on GitHub, you can use them in commercial applications without paying me or asking for permission, and almost all of them are a single .prg that you copy into your project.
| Library | What it does |
|---|---|
| JSONFox | Read and write JSON from VFP. I use it in everything I build, this portal included |
| FoxRemote | One API for SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Firebird and SQLite through ODBC, with parameters and transactions |
| LinqVFP | LINQ-style queries over collections and cursors: Where, Select, OrderBy, GroupBy, Join and aggregates |
| FoxCollection | Array, dictionary, stack and queue, with Count and Item() like a Collection |
| FoxExtends | Functions VFP 9 never had: PRINTF, NEWGUID, ENUM, regular expressions, and ADIR and AFIELDS as objects |
| FoxStyleSheet | Themes for your forms written like CSS, without touching the form. It ships 16, including a light one and a dark one |
| VFPStretch | Resizes the controls of a form when the window changes size, with one line in the Init |
You install them with FoxPack, which is open source too:
foxpack add jsonfox
foxpack add foxremoteFoxPack pins the version of each library in your project, and anyone can publish their own with a foxpack.json in the repository and a version tag.
Free tools, no license
These aren’t open source, but they have no license and don’t go through the store: you download them and use them.
- FoxKit brings four command line tools. vfp2text turns VFP binaries (
.scx,.vcx,.frx,.pjx,.dbc…) into text and back, so you can see the changes in git. foxproof runs FoxProof tests. foxengine queries and changes DBF tables, and creates and builds projects. vfpdocs is the official VFP 9 SP2 help, offline, so an AI agent can check the syntax before it writes code. - FoxStack puts all those tools behind a single MCP entry, so Claude or another agent can work with your code, your tests and your tables.
- wxForge is a plugin for XIDE, the X# IDE: 40 color themes, a panel to try X# code without building the project, GUIDs in six formats, and the connection to FoxAgent.
Coming soon, also free
I am finishing two more, both under the MIT license:
- FoxDock, a plugin system for the VFP 9 IDE. It adds a menu with plugins to turn a table into JSON or into a SQL script, keep connections to database servers without a password in any file, get back the previous version of a form, a class or a report, and change the colors of the editor.
- FoxQuery, to keep the SQL of an application in named queries, one
.sqlfile per query. The program asks forcustomers.by_city, passes the parameters and never builds the SQL text. The same query runs on SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Firebird, SQLite and DBF.
I will announce them here and in the group when they are published.
What is for sale
These are the products with a paid license:
| Product | What it is |
|---|---|
| FoxServer | A REST API or a website written in VFP, without IIS. FoxServer Runtime is the license to install it on your customers’ servers |
| FoxCore | Background tasks inside your application, without the screen freezing |
| FoxBridge | Use .NET libraries from VFP |
| FoxAgent | Connects your running VFP or .NET application to an AI agent, which sees its screens and its data. FoxAgent Runtime is the license to ship it with your application |
| FoxCli | Command line applications in VFP. It includes FoxService, so a VFP process can run as a Windows service |
| FoxCli MCP | Turns a CLI built with FoxCli into tools for an agent |
| Golem | To get into a customer’s server with an AI agent. GolemDb adds SQL access with preview, backup and undo |
Prices are on the pricing page. You can try almost everything before paying: FoxServer, FoxCore, FoxBridge, FoxAgent, FoxCli and FoxCli MCP have a 30-day full license, with no card and no cut-down version. Golem has no 30-day trial, but without a license it starts in evaluation mode, with the tools that look at the remote machine, and you don’t need to sign up. Patreon members get a discount on developer licenses; redistribution and company licenses are at list price.
If you stick with the free things, you help me too: a star on GitHub or telling another FoxPro developer that they exist helps them reach more people.