When it comes to data intensive manipulations, it is very difficult to be better than Visual FoxPro. I recently had a thread in .NET forum about a problem I had when doing such process. In VFP, I can do things I have to do differently in .NET. For example, my VFP framework is capable of doing multiple calls in a table within a fraction of a second. I do that for several forms on the Universal Thread which makes use of about 40 labels coming from the messages table. Don't try to do that approach in .NET. Basically, I had to do one call, end up with all records of the table in one dataset, even if I only need 40 of them, scan them and only get the ones I need. So, I end up processing unused records simply because I need the response request to be as fast as when I do it in VFP.

I have built multiple applications in .NET but they are mostly monitoring interfaces, Web Services and ASP.NET applications. The .NET Framework is really powerful but when comes time to handle the data, prepare to be ready as it is a different world.