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Message
From
29/09/2005 15:37:37
 
 
To
29/09/2005 12:43:55
Hilmar Zonneveld
Independent Consultant
Cochabamba, Bolivia
General information
Forum:
Visual FoxPro
Category:
Other
Miscellaneous
Thread ID:
01054553
Message ID:
01054646
Views:
24
>I noticed that many developers seem to have upgraded until VFP version 6, but then stopped. At work we still use version 6. I suggested upgrading, but it seems they are not too keen on the expense. A while ago, the reason was rather the compatibility with operating systems (version 8 or later is not designed to work with Windows 95), but by now, that should be irrelevant.
>
>I was wondering, for what reasons other develoeprs remained with version 6. Is it the upgrade cost? The Windows versions supported? Not enough time to learn the new features? Or some other reason?

Back when Y2K was such a big problem there were questions about why the IT world was so late to notice the problem and respond. The answer (at least for me) is that the problem was recognized a long time ago (at least back to the 70's) but there was an expectation that all the affected systems would migrate to newer platforms where 2-digit years would not be a problem. So the Y2K problems were shelved as, essentially, non-issues for applications that were expected to be gone.

The real problem was that a large number of applications actually did what they were supposed to do....and did it quite well. Moving to new environments would be costly, time-consuming, and produce no benefits other than being in a new environment. Just being in the new environment wasn't worth the cost. Suddenly Y2K was there and so were the applications.

How does this apply to the question at hand????

In my case, I support a relatively mature set of applications. They worked just fine in FPW2.6 and provided all the functionality required. When all workstations were migrated from NT to XP we found the application did not work well in the new environment (screen resolution issues are what I think the main problem was) so it was ported to VFP 6.

What would we gain by moving to VFP (latest version)??? Without almost completely re-engineering the applications, not very much. And there's no need to re-engineer the applications. They do what they are supposed to do and they do it well.

Plus, moving to newer versions is not a completely seemless operation. While relatively minor, there are deployment issues. More important is the amount of code that will have to be changed -- especially the SQL that was built around more forgiving GROUP BY syntax.

So, for us......it's not laziness, it's not ignorance, there's just no need.
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