Jos,

>Just glance over the spec sheet for Windev http://www.pcsoft.fr/us/ . This is going to be our next dev tool.

as we both already use some identical sw besides vfp, I took some time to at least read the site in more detail.

To be honest, it sounds so good that I suspect major marketing BS - but perhaps I am influenced an undue amount by some commentaries about Windev, their user base and their conferences on c't (IMHO one of the best all-around computer magazines) forums. There the gist was: Quite a lot of errors / problems arizing out of day to day use / problems if you are unable to communicate in french (which definitely would be a problem for me on a technical level <g>) and so on. I have no idea / frame of reference for the aliases posting this info, so they might have been quite heavily on the troll side of things.

- Have you already decided or is this tool your current favorite ? 
- How much actual work/testing have you done with the tool ? 
- How OOP is this W-language ? Seems to be object based basic from the few lines found, but that was VB5/6 as well <bg>.
- How datacentric is the langauge / what concepts we love from vfp are supported (seems to support ISAM and CS) ?
- How fast is their "hyperfile" implementation ? (table size seems very ample <g>)
- How good is their non-french support really ?
   vers. 11 only described in french, ok for a first release planned end of this march.
   some of the deeper links in english only refer to version 9, upper to version 10 ?
   german links I found were for versions 8 and 9
   english forum is tiny compared to french ones and seems to mirror posting on other sites ?

- Generating Java and .Net would be great, but what percentage is supported (at least java only partially as I read it)
- How difficult/expensive is it to get a few expirienced developers to help in a crunch ?

- There seems to be a runtime/deployment cost for web applications per server (only skimmed by me).

One of the main things making me wait on python, my favorite for experimenting, is the comparatively low nomber of web server sides having python infrastructure already pre-packaged: php and asp.net have the lead by a wide margin, and while python seems to in front of the rest (much better infrastructure than for any of the vfp tools IMHO), it is not in the same league as the two market leaders. It might deter very small clients (comfortably on their existing cheap hosting sites) and very large clients (again having to battle IT departments arguing for a strategic monoculture...).

I would definitely be interested to get some more facts driving *your* decision making process -
the official info is just too perfect for this german cynic.

regards

thomas