What are the FoxPro Foundation Classes?

The Visual FoxPro Foundation Classes, or FFC for short, are a set of class libraries that ship with
Visual FoxPro. The Visual FoxPro Help file describes them as “a variety of foundation classes for
enhancing your Visual FoxPro Applications with little or no programming.” Each of the individual
classes facilitates some particular functionality that can be useful to the VFP developer when
designing solutions.
The FoxPro Foundation Classes are organized into thirty nine class libraries containing a total of
one hundred twelve individual classes. Naturally, not all developers will find the all of the
foundation classes useful, but with that much variety it’s virtually certain every developer will find
at least something of value in the FFC.
Although all of the foundation classes are contained in visual class libraries (.vcx files), not all of
the individual classes are visual in nature. Most of the classes are designed to be dropped on a
form, but some are designed to be used programmatically and some can be used either way.
All of the foundation classes come with source code, meaning you can not only use them “as is”
but you can also look at the source code to see how they work. Moreover, the FFC are licensed
for modification and redistribution, so you can modify them—or, better yet, subclass them—to
suit your needs.

FFC, XSource, Sedna, and VFPX

Before going any further, it might be helpful to review the difference between the FoxPro
Foundation Classes and the other add-ons and extensions to Visual FoxPro 9.0.
The FoxPro Foundation Classes are a set of classes that provide enhanced functionality for VFP
applications. They were developed by Microsoft and are installed when you install Visual FoxPro.
The FFC were first introduced with Visual FoxPro 6.0.
The XSource files contain the source code for the so-called XBase tools such as the Class
Browse, the Data Explorer, and many others. These tools were also developed by Microsoft and
are installed with VFP as a zip file. You can find xsource.zip in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual
FoxPro 9.0\Tools\xsource\.
Sedna’s official title is “The Sedna Add-Ons for Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP2”. It comprises
six projects developed by Microsoft to enhance VFP’s ability to interoperate with Windows Vista,
the .NET framework, and more. The Sedna files are not installed with VFP but can be
downloaded from Microsoft via the link on the Visual FoxPro home page.
VFPX is the umbrella name for all of the current and future projects developed by the VFP
community to enhance Visual FoxPro beyond VFP 9.0 SP2. The VFPX projects are not installed
with VFP; they are available for download from the VFPX section of the CodePlex website at
www.codeplex.com/VFPX. For this reason, the name VFPX is used to refer both to the website
and to the projects hosted there. The VFPX website is becoming an increasingly valuable
community resource, where you can also add your own contributions to the ongoing efforts to
enhance and extend Visual FoxPro.
The following chart summarizes the differences between the FFC, XSource, Sedna, and VFPX.

Name Developed By Distributed w/ VFP Comments
FFC Microsoft Yes Foundation Classes
XSource Microsoft Yes XBase Tools Source
Sedna Microsoft No Extensions for VFP
VFPX Community No Extensions for VFP
In addition to the community-based projects on VFPX, the latest versions of the FoxPro
Foundation Classes and the XSource files are also available for download from the VFPX
website.