>>>>Thanks. Everything with my wife is OK. See THREAD#1011113. As for the PHB, I'll be asking some .NET questions.
>>>
>>>Now you are barred not only from UT but from VFP also?
>>
>>Sergey,
>>
>>Basically, yes. I'll prototype in VFP, but that's frowned on. Unfortunately, I've been lied to. I was told by the PHB that I'd be given every opportunity to demonstrate why VFP should be used in some situations. I haven't had that opportunity.
>
>George,
>
>Does product pricing (and thus profits) have influence on this position by the PHB?

Jim,

Nope. And I'll give you an example. The Costing System I wrote, originally in FPD 2.5, and later in FPW 2.6 handles the entire range of the process. It has to dynamically figure out what processes apply and what don't through the routing string. It originally took me (alone) 4 months to write. I completely re-wrote it in 4 months later.

A couple of years ago, we were given a project (code name Oasis) to do. Much of the necessary calculations were already handled in the Costing System, so the decision was made for me to write a COM object that PowerBuilder could interface with.

First, we got the requirements wrong, so that was four months right there. My COM object also interfaced with Excel to produce diagrams needed in the process. The entire project took 14 months by 5 people. Later, it was re-written, by two or three people and not using the code that I had already provided, in 7 months.

Why wasn't my COM object used? I was told by the PHB that, "It was wrong." It was wrong not because the numbers that it returned were incorrect, but because the environment (PowerBuilder) couldn't handle the IDispatch interface. It would blow up every time a call to the re-intialize method was called. I ran over 2,000 tests against the object in both VBScript and VFP without a problem.

>I'm thinking that China is DEEP into carpet manufacturing now, and there may be an effort underway at your company to do **ANYTHING** to improve competitiveness.

Jim, Shaw is a Berkshire-Hathaway company. Believe me, we're plenty competitive.

>MS has done a great job at implying that .NET lets things be done far cheaper and far more flexibly, and this may be one factor in their attempts to lower costs of production. Not that I could agree in any way that .NET (plus other steps) could save them from going to China (or closing), but desperate people will try anything.

There's a lot of good stuff in .NET. Some of it is better than VFP. Data munging, however, is not among it. That's where VFP shines.
>good luck with it all.