I think it has to do with VFPs ability to work as a complete island. There aren't too many other development environments that work in a completely monolithic fashion these days, but in VFP, you have everything from the UI to the logic to the database.

I think this is a big part of the explanation why VFP developers tend to be so focused on the tool and have an aversion to everything that isn't VFP. That is pretty unusual when you think about it...

Markus



>The only difference being that of all of the developers I know using Delphi, not one has yet left it in favor of a new or different tool. I know of a couple who are ALSO programming with other tools, but none that have actually left Delphi after the turmoil. Surprisingly, Delphi programmers seem a lot more willing to work with more than one tool than we VFPers are (in general). I don't know why that is. When I started learning c# I kept it pretty much to myself. I have not focused on it indepth or exclusively and won't for sometime still I think. I plan on learning vb.net now and perhaps using c# behind the scenes and vb up front. I've never sat back and been satisfied to know only one method of doing something. This is my work. I enjoy it. Why would I limit myself? I still have not found anything that works better than VFP when it comes to data. Not every app or module is all about data though. I see alot of use with VFP still for years to come. Will it be used for new
>development? After using VFP since Foxbase, only if there is a time crunch. I can knock out an app in VFP in less than half the time I can with dotnet, but that is because of the years and years I have used it. One day, I hope to be as proficient in another tool. Perhaps that will be vb.net or C#.net, perhaps not. We'll see :o)
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>>>I think you are confusing things here. Criteria differ for IT companies as compared to othertype companies. An (hypothethical or not) othertype company, possibly a customer of the IT company or a company with a VFP IT department and several other-language departments, has decided in the past to do development of a set of applications with VFP. And in all past years they were able to upgrade those applications. And now they feel forced to have those applications rewritten entirely. Such a company doesn't necessarilly have a management problem. They have a problem due to a decision that another company (MS) made. They have been trusting MS too much a number (2, 5, 10) of years ago. They will feel relief for the fact that their other applications have not been built in VFP, often because they refused to listen to VFP adepts.
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>>I don't think so. Most of my work for the last 20 years has been around software projects for companies out of the IT industry. For most of them, change between platforms and tools is frequent and taken for granted.
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>>In the accounting and administrative area, many companies got applications written in VB, for example. They had been changing the applications quite often between versions (and that wasn't like VFP plain recompiles, believe me), including changing data access from RDO to DAO to ADO, and so on. They changed their VB windows-based apps to ASP web sites, then -in many cases- back to windows as they couldn't meet their final goals, and so on...
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>>Something quite like that happened in the Java environment, with some important changes coming in every version, and with people going to EJBs, then back to POJOs when EJB got too much, from JDBC to Hibernate or other ORMs, from applets to servlets to JSP, and so on...
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>>You probably don't want to know about the people who choose Delphi. They even experience the whole company behind the product changing its name back and forth...
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>>No single vendor can guarantee stability. VFP was able to keep an incredible level of backward compatibility during the last 20 years and will keep going on for some 10 or 20 more, surely. But this is NOT something usual in the IT industry, and it has a big drawback, too, and it is that there is a lot of people who still code with VFP 9 in the same way that 20 years ago, even when the tool is very up-to-date.