I remember attending the local Foxpro user group meeting when MS had reps going around to the groups to do a VFP dog and pony. There was a guy I had seen several times who constantly raised his hand during the presentation asking about some feature/way of doing things in FP Windows/Dos and how you would accomplish it in VFP.

What really set him off was that there was no longer an SPR. Don't know if you worked with FP, but SPR was the source file for a screen. It wasn't a table, just a text file. The guy complaining didn't like that he could no longer just look at the soure code to the form, since it was kind of hidden in the SCX table now.

I thought he was kidding. But a number of years later I saw him attend a user group for the first time in a while. Someone who knew him yelled across the room at him and asked what he was doing. He said he was supporting some old FP/Dos apps. So he obviously wasn't kidding about something he didn't like in VFP.

Was it a smart decision. I certainly don't think so.

In the USA if you work in a company or as a consultant, the writing was on the wall even back when JVP was pushing VB6 that the amount of Foxpro jobs was dwindling.

As a developer of off-the-shelf software, the writing was on the wall when more and more corporations put Foxpro on the do not use list. So even if a user loved your software compared to the competition, they had to sneak it in the backdoor, or go with the competition.

If I didn't understand all that already, it really hit home 2 yrs ago when I was interviewing to fill a Foxpro position. Any person we called in because they had exactly the kind of experience I was looking for, also had dotnet experience. And ended up taking a dotnet position. And I have a friend working at another company that's gone thru the same scenario in the last couple months.



>What does that have to do with missing features?! Unless you're saying it is OK for NET to miss out some features because it has lots of other stuff?
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>You missed my point. You stated that some might feel satisfaction in waiting until VFP came out. My point is that .NET is currently a much larger animal by comparison, and learning what exists at the moment can still be leveraged. LINQ will be a great addition - but there's so much more to .NET that exists right now that will be in use when VS'07 comes out.
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>My bottom line, and I don't know if you agree with this or not: those who have made a decision to wait to look at .NET until VS2007 comes out, are putting themselves at a disadvantage.