Will VFP 9.0 and FPD 2.6 run on Windows Server 2019 or 2012?

Question

We're in the process of converting our two FoxPro systems to new technology, but meanwhile we need to upgrade our server and I am trying to find out whether our legacy systems will run there. We'd prefer to go to Windows Server 2019, but using Server 2012 is possible. Our stations are Win 7 or 10 Pro, some 64-bit.

One system is in Visual FoxPro 9 and uses its native DBFs and some DBFs in FPD 2.6 format. Certain graphical and document functions (e.g.: OCR) are performed by calls to LeadTools 12.0. The application also calls Outlook.

The second system is a single-user application in FoxPro for DOS 2.6 run from an .app file. The 32-bit stations run this natively, while the 64-bit stations use the product, vDOS, to allow the 16-bit FPD to run there. The application wants to reside on the server since multiple stations can run it, albeit at different times.

Any help is much appreciated. Thank you!

Answer 1

Will a Visual FoxPro 9 EXE run on those server operating systems? Yes.

Will a Foxpro For DOS or FoxPro for Windows EXE run on those server operating systems? No. Those flavours of FoxPro are 16-bit, and as such would require a 32-bit version of Windows Server, the last of which was Server 2008.

However I suspect you are not running either of these on the server. You have a shared folder on the server with the DBFs in it, and the executables are running on workstations.

So if you have a 64-bit OS on the workstation then you can only run the Visual FoxPro exectuable directly. If you had a 32-bit OS on the workstation, you can run both Visual FoxPro and FoxPro for DOS\Windows executables.

Your question is really 'can I put the DBFs in a shared folder on those server operating systems and access them from client workstations?', and yes you can.