Hi Kevin

Questions:
How many developers, programmers and designers in your organization?

Do you know how much it cost your firm, to get to the point where are just now able to develop small applications? Don't forget to include salaries, benefits, overhead while working on your in house framework. I will take your answer in Pounds or Dollars, as you would prefer.

Since you work for the government, you enjoy less deadline pressure and do not have to worry about whether you make money or lose money. On the other hand, those of us living in the real world have to add lost opportunity cost to the salary, benefits, overhead cost already mentioned when considering efficent development.

As far as code mantainability, with all respect; .Net is not that much easier to maintain. Using VFP 9, OOP, and multiple tier development, modern VFP apps are just as maintainable.

As far as bugs, .NET only checks compiler errors. You still need to build a test harness in .NET, just as you do in VFP. And, it is easy enough to build bugs in a .Net application that are not caught by the compiler.

By the way, chap. We used a commercial framework (MM .Net) which has at least 4 years of development effort in the framework. In in my judgment, I rank the framework as "very good".

- Cheers
Donald Lowrey