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We didn't read about the last four platform shifts.
We shipped through them. Every era below was going to last forever, and none of them did — which is the single most useful thing we've learned, and the reason we build the way we do.
The long version
Thirty years of the same problem in different clothes.
The technology has changed beyond recognition. The actual job — model the business honestly, store the data properly, make it fast, make it clear — has not changed at all.
The xBase years
dBASE, Clipper and FoxPro. Character-mode and early Windows business systems for companies who were computerising for the first time. Tight constraints, indexed files, and code you could not afford to write carelessly.
Client / server
Visual FoxPro and VB6 over SQL Server. Genuine multi-user systems: concurrency, transactions, locking and referential integrity — and the discipline that comes from a shared database with real money in it.
The .NET build-out
C# and the .NET Framework. WinForms and WPF, ASP.NET, web services and n-tier architecture, deployed everywhere from a two-person office to a corporate network with hundreds of users.
Modern .NET
Cross-platform .NET, ASP.NET Core and Blazor, REST APIs, Azure SQL, Git and automated deployment. New tools, same job — and a healthy respect for how temporary any of it is.
What it's worth to you
Longevity isn't nostalgia. It's a design input.
Having watched four "permanent" platforms come and go, we design on the assumption that this one is temporary too. In practice that means a handful of unglamorous habits that repeatedly turn out to matter a decade later.
- The data model is the asset, and it outlives every interface built on top of it
- Business rules live somewhere findable, not scattered through screen event handlers
- Every dependency is a bet — we keep the number of bets small and the exits obvious
- Boring, well-understood technology beats novel technology for systems that must simply work
- Whatever we build, someone else has to maintain one day. We write for that person
Worked with, over the years
Some of that list is history rather than a recommendation — but history is exactly what's needed when the system you're being asked to rescue was written in it.
Where we've worked
From the smallest applications through to major corporate installations.
The scale changes what's appropriate; it doesn't change the standard. A five-user system deserves the same honest data model as a five-hundred-user one — it just doesn't need the same ceremony around it.
Small business
Single applications that run an entire operation — jobs, quoting, stock, invoicing — usually replacing a mix of paper, spreadsheets and hope.
Mid-sized companies
Multi-user systems across sites and departments, integrated with accounting and third-party services, with reporting people actually depend on.
Corporate installations
Larger deployments alongside in-house teams: databases, integrations and specialist components inside an existing architecture and change process.
Long-lived relationships
Much of our work has been for the same clients over many years — through several platform generations of the same business system.
The company
FoxSol Pty Ltd. The name is a clue about where we started.
FoxSol Pty Ltd is an Australian company (A.C.N. 133 940 646) specialising in data-centric business applications. We work directly with clients — there is no account management layer, and the person who scopes your work is the person who writes it.
The lookoutmars.com name has been ours for a long time, from an era when a domain was mostly a private joke. We've kept it. The work underneath it has been consistently serious.
Got something built in an era we recognise?
Whether it needs rescuing, extending or replacing, we've very likely seen its exact predicament before. Tell us what you're dealing with.