>You must be talking about .NET here. Most people here(including EPS!) have commented that you typically need more code to write a .NET application because it lacks the functions VFP has..

Depends on what you're talking about. Somethings take a lot more code in VFP than in .NET. Simple example, client side Web Service consumption. Serialization of objects in distributed applications.

The argument that your right more code in .NET doesn't really hold water either. Most of my .NET apps are considerably smaller in terms of compiled lines of code than the same exact VFP code.

While it's true that some 'bread and butter' things like data access take a lot of code, who writes that sort of code over and over again? I don't do that in VFP or in .NET. That's what business objects and a data access layer are for. If you're trying to tell me you write your data access logic right into your front end code then you deserve everything you're going to reap from that folly regardless of which platform you use...

And here is where the real advantage is: The reason that many things in .NET require more code is because there's a lot more functionality behind many of the objects. You want consistent text support in VFP (including Unicode)? Can't do it... You want to write data with specific encodings to disk? Can't do it (not without API calls anyway)... All those 'little' things that VFP ignores are built into the system. You want high speed text access that's even faster than VFP's fast text processing engine? And you want it with a consistent set of rules rather than - if the string is this big it will work best like this, but if its this big it will work better like that...

Any developer worth their salt abstracts core functionality into a reusable libraries that make what you need to do easy to do. Most 'simple' VFP commands are not so simple once you add proper error handling and deal with a complete real world implementation. When given a choice to create that sort of abstraction between having one line of code that doesn't give me options to configure the functionality or 10 lines of code where I can get exactly what I need, which do you think is better?