Hi Kevin,

I was really excited when the proposition was posted. I thought "Great! I'm going to see a client/server app done in both VFP and dotnet so I can see the difference in how it is accomplished." I didn't really see it as a competition. I hoped to learn from it and to see an example of the strengths/weaknesses of both products and how to work around the weaknesses (the most important factor). I figured each participant would add in the strengths on their own even though they might not be a part of the initial requirement. The opportunity to see that and learn from developers of your caliber was an amazing opportunity. That of course, would require that it not be a competition but rather a demonstration. I would still like to see that one day and will remain hopeful that it may still happen. I have to admit that when I first saw your initial post in this thread I was dismayed. I too saw it as a means of wriggling out of the deal and was dissappointed. I got a great laugh (I really did laugh outloud) at John's post on the car/bicycle competition. Humour is a good thing though. I think one day you may look back on this thread with humour and see how apropos his humour was. Now that I read the below post though I can see where your additional scalability requirement came from. It was claimed that the VFP app could be more scalable (I had overlooked that) and you added a specific scalability feature to the requirements which in turn knocked it out of the ballpark. Regardless, I would really like to see a demonstration of accomplishing the same thing with both products and then as an aside, additional examples of extensibility. Well, maybe one day.


>Craig,
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>Thanks...that's fine, I respect that. We can agree to disagree. While I don't feel backed into any corner, yes, these debates do get frustrating and I sometimes wonder what the point is.
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>But please know that I didn't throw out things like asynchronous processing and raising/responding to events as a means to terminate the discussion with a simple trump card. Jeff's challenge included scalability, a very broad topic. I chose to go into some details by tasks including (but limited to) checking for emails and polling. These are handled more efficiently in .NET. Yes, they can be done in Fox, but as the application grows in size, the latter is operating from an inefficient premise.
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>I agree that developers often cling to a single technology. I have 4 calling cards, .NET/SQL/VFP/Crystal. I'd love to learn more, but there are so many hours in a day.
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>Yes, picking battles wisely is good advice. In this instance, I was challenged, and offered to use the challenge as a form of education for the community.
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>And finally, a few have mentioned LINQ in these discussions. To be fair, I'll welcome the capabilities in LINQ. I've never said .NET was perfect at handling local data. It can always be improved. But somehow there is this perception that the plans for LINQ complete invalidate what can be done today. Just because new (and welcome) additions are down the road, does not mean that all of the problems cannot be addressed today.
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>And also to be fair, LINQ is being discussed by .NET developers who haven't used fox. MSDN Codecamp in NJ had a session on LINQ that was well-attended.
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>Thanks, (and congrats on receiving your MVP award)
>Kevin