>I have a substantial project to develop and decided to spend the money and time to seriously evaluate dot Net. The first month was "oh god, I'll never get this". After the third month I felt I could develop reasonable, sound code in .Net using C#. I experimented with using SQL, SQLExpress and VFP as the backend data sources. Candidly, the data handling in C# is clunky. There is a lot more code to write to get results that are easy to obtain in VFP.
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>My conclusion is that for most developers, .Net is not ready for prime time.
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>I also estimated how much money (read salary expense) it would take to develop a fairly sophisticated application in C# as compared to VFP. Again, VFP won.
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>Before people start shouting, consider that I made a serious effort to learn and understand C#. Can you set aside 3 full months to work exclusively with C#? That's pretty much what I did, and it was a very expensive undertaking for our firm.
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>Let me say that there are many many features in C# .Net that I would like to have in VFP, more controls in the foundation classes is a big item and the ability to be more creative in building user interfaces in C#. Microsoft gets an "A" here.
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>But my bottom line, is that C# .Net development is cumbersome and is a much slower development tool than VFP, even allowing something for a disparity in experience (more experience with VFP).
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>From the perspective of Microsoft, I can understand why that corporation thinks C# is the greatest thing since sliced bread. And if I had big budgets and multiple engineer teams available to me, I might agree.
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>However, we are a small shop with two primary developers and two developers with somewhat less experience. The .NET promise of RAD does not hold up very well when compared to VFP. If you are a C coder, then C# is much faster, but not when compared to VFP.
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>In the end, whether developing with C# .Net or VFP, my customers will be able to query the same data, get the same reports and otherwise have the same experience on either product platform. So if it cost me more time and money to develop in C#, and the end result is the same; then from a business perspective, which product platform should I choose?

Well, it seems as though your decision was entirely productivity-focused. I see this a lot, every-day in fact in my organisation - people continue to "bang-out" applications, is this good? Yeah, it's great for the first release, but then the next release becomes more complicated, more bugs creep in, quality starts to drop, ultimately your app becomes a maintenance nightmare and as a result of this your customers will become increasingly aggitated.

It's all well saying you can pump out apps quicker in VFP, but what about the quality? My experience in C# has been a good one, the quality of our applications has improved; maintenance is no longer a nightmare; less bugs are in our applications. Yes, it may take a few more days or such to get the application out, but boy is it a stable, solid and almost entirely bug-free release.

I question whether 3 months was enough, 12 months would've been more realistic, did you consider taking a test-driven approach? creating your own litte framework? unit-testing etc.?

In a nutshell I would say that the chances of me making a school-boy error in C# is minimal due to greatly superior compiler in C# over the VFP one, I now much prefer strongly-typed languages, with VFP I was always stepping on eggshells so that I don't get frequently annoying silly run-time errors during testing, I don't get this with C#, maybe I'm a crap VFP programmer, who knows, that's just my experience with it.

If you want to speedily bang-out apps what expense is this ultimately resulting in?

Kev