Visual FoxPro is used for developing data-centric desktop applications with its own internal database. Applications developed with VFP are also able to communicate with different database systems such as Oracle, mySQL, SQL Server and many other OLE-DB accessible data sources. But, generally, most VFP applications talk to SQL Server as well as to its own native database engine.

As a dynamic object-oriented language, VFP supports multiple class libraries as well as a class browser and is able to provide dynamic subclassing (during run-time) and data dictionary capabilities. Visual FoxPro operates on dynamic inheritance and instantiates classes directly from a class library or base classes and modify these at run-time.

Uses of Virtual FoxPro include:

• Object-oriented rapid application development
• Data processing
• As a COM client/server
• Fast text processing
• Data munging
• Creating and consuming XML natively
• Creating and consuming Web services
• GUI front-end and middle tier (business rules) in N-tier architectures