Jim,

>Think about it. If you had lots of working code running your production systems you'd surely be interested in exploiting that stuff rather than write it anew.

That depends on the decision-maker and his/her perspective.

Often, programmers may be so enamored with the idea of learning a new language or platform (and getting paid to do so) that they will be happy to throw away lots of code to rewrite the entire application -- job security, you know?

IT Managers at big companies often are much more motivated by the hype of "the new best thing" that they are willing to throw away lots of code (and the accumulated years of fine-tuning and debugging) to make certain they don't seem out of date or out of step.

In a similar scenario recently, I got mostly blank stares from the IT department architecture team when explaining the many, many ways that VFP can interoperate with other platforms -- from .NET COM Interop to Web Services to XML to .NET Dataset compatibility. The concept of repackaging and reusing an asset of great value seemed truly a foreign concept, as they explained how hiring 10 .NET developers to completely rewrite the application was obviously the best answer.

In the end, some higher-ups saw the concept that leveraging what they have during a multi-year transition phase made much more sense than a complete rewrite.