...and if you think with your head and not with your heart, and if you live in Portugal (what, i think, is the case) you should not put VFP apart.

I work in a Big Portuguese Company (+3000 employees) but we have hundreds of Points of sale, all of them with 4, 5, 10, 20 people max, and when i compare my applications (made with VFP) with other applications (.Net, Visual Studio, you name it) i feel the King of the World.

And i'm not the only one: last year, one of my clients (also a big corporation) said to me that my development environment was dead and tried to change it to an application made by their own development personel. That application runs with a SQL back end for the data and with VB as the front end. It was in May, we were running the 2 applications at same time, our idea was doing this during May and maybe June 2005, next we would kill my application. The rest my friend is history: we are in November-2006 my application is still running and their application... well, i don't know what happened to it.

The reason was: my application, with 5 years of use, with 750Mb of data, was faster and cleaner than the other. And notice: the SQL data was in a clean DataBase, created for that purpose in a clean server. And that has nothing to do with the other developers skills (it was a group against a solo developer), they're experienced people. I did not won, VFP did it for me.

I don't know why MS don't use this advantage: they are always trying to find another product: the next one will do better. Now we are earing that maybe Visual Studio 2007 will do what VFP do (it is a Kafkian situation: trying to create a product that maybe in the next version will do what the old does now, and say that the old is a bad product).

Only 1 year ago, VFP was dead. So did say VB developers, now VB is dead and none is crying for it. And we know VFP is alive, dying, but alive. And it is dying for 15 years by now. I remember this kind of talks about 10 years ago, 8 years ago, 5 years ago, 2 years ago,...

And in Portugal where you and i live, 95% of the work is made for little business, maybe the rest of the job (the other 5%) is for big corporations, but as you see, i'm working in a corporation and i do not change VFP for nothing.... well, unless MS will force me. And that seems to be the case, but until then...

Joaquim


>Tracy that was my exact point, but u shouldn't blame the MVP's this is our profession we do it for a living, i'm not a MVP let me state that even before some one start saying that I think i'm better then anyone, I don't think that i'm not better or worst then any beguinner or MVP or expert, I'm what i'm and i'm proud of that.
>Now as Professionals we must think with our head and not with our heart.
>as I said before in my last devcon I saw the written in the wall, and I wasn't listaken as time prove it to me.
>I didn't wanted VFP in the framework cause by then you would loose all the VFP advantages, I would like to see VFP as a standalone product with just integration with SQL like it was a VFP data.
>now all the work is being incorporated into .net framework, most of latest ado.net changes and speed improvements have come from VFP and that is great, but for me isn't a enough reason to stick only with VFP.
>
>
>>SNIP
>>>My dream was to have VFP interact with SQL the same way it interacted with VFP data.
>>
>>We shared the same dream. I also wished that VFP would be IN dotnet - I don't care the reasons why it couldn't or shouldn't be - it will always have been my preference that it be IN dotnet - however it was managed. (I think the writing on the wall was overwritten in bright red bold letters when it was NOT and sadly I think our most valuable professionals helped nail the lid on the coffin at that time) My dreams don't typically come true as I haven't won the lottery yet. However, last night four deer walked in front of my car when I was backseat driving home (my 15 year old was actually driving (now that is a nerve-wrecking experience) - is that a good omen or a bad one? :o)