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c#visual-foxprodbf

Reading from DBF files in C# without a driver

I'm currently writing a C# 4.5 desktop application intended to help troubleshoot an old VPF application. My app is intended to display a list of things that can commonly be broken along with their current status.

A few of the things I need to display are found in the VFP application's databases so I need to be able to read DBase databases. However, I have a few restrictions that make this tricky:

  1. I can't guarantee that any DBF driver has been installed on the system.
  2. My application should run without a separate installer so I can't just toss in the ACE redistributable. (I could install ACE together with the VFP app but I don't want to rely on any part of it being intact, even bundled libraries.)

Is there anything I can bundle with my app that can read VFP databases and doesn't require installation?

Solution

  • I wouldn't want to do this... but you could parse the files yourself.

    It looks like someone on github has the same idea.