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

2 developers that worked on the framework.

>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.

Framework development started and continues during normal application development, we've written around 5 (small) applications since July last year and the Framework has continued to evolve, again, only 2 of us were equipped to carry out this work, combined salaries would be £50k a year, around 3 solid months have been spent getting the framework to decent stage. On top of this we have to support existing applications.

>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.

We work for other departments within the organisation, they are customers - and make no mistake we do have deadlines and customers get extremely irrate if we don't deliver on time, on top of that we have government deadlines whereby we have to adhere to new government standards, given our extremely constant heavy workload and under-resourcing we are under pressure at all times.

>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.

I disagree, what happens if you change the name of a property or property type in your VFP middle-tier? Does the compiler pick this up?

>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".

I don't recall questioning the MM Framework, I haven't used it so therefore can't comment, how much does it cost BTW?

Kev