Hi Rick,

>>That's easy - many organizations follow Microsoft today as they once did for IBM. Let's say Microsoft pushed VFP instead of .NET. You can bet a lot of shops would be jumping all over themselves trying to implement VFP. In other words, it's less for the technical merits, in a lot of cases, and more because it's the latest and greatest from MS. Some developers like you get caught up in this and have to go whichever way the wind is blowing. I'm sure there are some areas where .NET would have the edge in technology simply because of the amount of resources they're putting behind it. However, I don't think, at this point, it would justify jumping ship purely on technical merits. This is classic Microsoft marketing strategy at work with a healthy dosage of FUD in the mix...

>Microsoft marketing aside it's up to developers to make decisions on how htey want to work.

How about developers beeing force to use a certain tool because it is demanded by their management or client for no technical reason ??

>I can tell you from experience that you will not get a VB6 developer to use VFP except in very rare circumstances even when demonstrating how much more productive you can be with VFP than VB6.

We hired a very intelligent guy having and was simply amazed with VFPs data integration. His experience in VB6 and a crash course by steven black turned him into be the best investment we ever have done.

>New developers who have never been exposed to xBase are not going to find VFP attractive for the same reason that many VFP developers do not find .NET attractive because they would loose features that they are so familiar with.

See experience above. You'll always have to see how your application fits into the development tool. For example our main application is VFP working on a SQL server database (in fact it could use both the VFP and SQL server backend), which in our opinion is the right choice because its highly flexible and data intensive character. On the other side we have some web development. Now since we did not have any experience in house regarding web development in combinations with VFP, and we did know somebody close doing WEB + VB, we decided we should be moving toward .NET integration of that piece of software.

>I have no argument with Microsoft's marketing practices sucking. From the early hype that they can't live up to, to the delays of new products that underdeliver to the musceling in to keep momentum going etc. But at teh same time you have to also acknowledge what does get delivered in the end.

I'm still waiting on Microsoft to announce a new development platform where RAD and Database integration has the foremost priority. From my idealogical standpoint this is the wave of the future. I'd like to promote the sentence: "Every application wants to be a database application when it grow" to "Every development tool wants to be a database tool when it grows up". .NET in any way you put it does not fit the bill. I'd rather wait for the announcement of the tool (Microsoft has some research projects going on that are more data centric), than hastly jump the wrong ship. I'd rather jump once into the right ship.

Walter,