Thanks Greg

I was looking to see what people who were excited about .Net found exciting, so thanks for giving me some insite. Some of the things you mention I have looked at but do not provide the critical mass necessary to justify the huge investment in time and effort required to make the jump on a personal or corporate level, for me but YMMV and may change with time.

I think any really cool functionality I will need will be available to foxpro through techniques that are publically available today. The exception to this might be strong typing, but hardly worth making a switch.

I don't see any great jump in functionality or a paradigm shift in programming structure that make the argument to switch course, a major commitment by any company.


>>Each company decides for itself what is the best match for them. I have never said .Net can't make a good app or web page, just that it is not the holy grail of programming. Many companies will choose .Net and do great, many other companies will choose .Net and fail. Same with Fox, or Java or whatever. You say you are learning dramatic steps forward, how dramatic is it, really?
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>Actually it is quite dramatic. The control validations and object data source binding capabailties are significantly reducing the amount of code I've needed to write and made the code that is remaining much more clean. Using datasets for the data tier, business objects for middle tier and binding on presentation is very slick in NET 2.0. I've worked a lot with codebook on VFP so I know about n-tier work but the new tools in .NET bring strong typing right from the data layer. In VFP for example, all the select statements you write are not typed. Errors in coding SQL make it past compile and are found only once you are in running the app. In .NET if you build proper n-tier with object data source much of the bugs in VFP that slip through to runtime are caught during compile. This includes miss typed fields or fields that are being assigned the wrong data type. May not sound like a big deal until you go back to VFP and realize how much time you spend working around pulling data and
>reporting it with no compile-time checking.
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>The membership tools built in to .NET are quite good as well. I don't know how much you know about this but you can pretty much create web authentication, manage users and their passwords, plus remember logon state, store extra data, etc. with very little code. Building such a common requirement into the architecture was brilliant. You don't have to use it. But it is there for you if you need it.
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>Another cool feature I'm really digging in .NET is the templates in gridviews, detailviews, and repeaters. Very powerful with binding to middle tier objects and flexbible as well. There simply is no equivelent to these tools on VFP. The more I build web apps, the more I move toward ASPNET 2.0. I've written a TON of web apps using VFP COM and it works, but the development cycle is brutal compared to ASP.NET.
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>Anyways, I think if you want to make fat clients then VFP is just as good as anything in .NET (outside of the business issue in finding programmers). When you are doing a lot of heavy web development however, VFP falls behind in that you have to write much code for what the .NET framework takes care of automatically.
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>Greg
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