Pertti:

Thanks for your reply.

I'm trying to get some sources to make an informed decision. The figures of tens of thousands potential market comes to my mind when I see the tremendous efforts made by compalies like F1-Tech and others who developed VFP frameworks and reached thousands of users, in despite that there is already a very good one for free (Codebook). Net extender and others are betting right now in VFP community support to make a reasonable business proposal.

We think that VFP advantages (DML and the hability to do a local database application) could be leveraged to a new generation of coders if we are able to provide alog with that smart client capaciteies and enterprise escalation in Multi OS and multi DB plataforms without all the useless compexities introduced by .NET.

What would be easier than develop in the way we are used to (design database, create project, forms and reports with direct DML) and application escalabre and web - enabled?

The current plataform (is Morfik) allow us to do that but it lacks just 2 things:

a) VFP sintax (it already has C#,Java,Pascal and VB).
b) Utility to convert current VFP projects to Morfik.

That's what we plan to do. Even if we fail to do b at 100%, we can make it easier to port existing applications to web client and guarantee a very good market share to begin with.
But to embrace that we would like to have some rought stimates. Maybe Somebody from Hentzenwerke publishing or somebody from VMF or F1Tech could tell us what are those numbers based in their own sales.

Regards

>Victor:
>
>I'm afraid you can't get ANY reliable market research figures this way. Who knows how big the user base is? Microsoft could probably make an educated guess by multiplying the total VFP9 sales by 2 or 3, but even that would be throwing darts blindfolded, and MS surely would not release those figures. IMO, you just can't base a business decision on a free-form user forum survey. You'll never know what your statistical accuracy is going to be, starting with the margin of error, so you might as well save yourself the time and trouble and go with your gut...
>
>What I can tell you with 100% statistical accuracy is that I personally am a day-to-day developor; I am already using .NET as an alternative and possibly migrating to it 100% over the next few years; I do want to keep the local VFP capabilities; I am not serious about running on Linux. But this is just an experience from an "Army of One".
>
>However, my **gut** feeling is that if someone would provide a minimum of 95% compatible VFP system, there would probably be thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of existing VFP users ready to put their money down on that proposition. Of course, demand is a function of price & marketing, so there's yet another few variables for you to ponder. Any announcements for a replacement system accompanied with a solid proof-of-concept evaluation system need to happen sooner rather than later, because right now a LOT of VFP shops small and large are preparing to make far reaching long-term development tool decisions, and once those decisions are made, it's an uphill battle for anyone to make them restart the evaluation process with another product. The way I see it, it is a pretty short window of opportunity.
>
>I would personally love to see a VFP alternative, because I have so much time and money invested in products currently running on this platform. But I am an over-50 "Old Dog" developer, like most of the VFP developers seem to be, so the main market for a replacement tool is just that, a replacement market. Trying to lure new developers to an xBase platform is probably a losing proposition -- the young(er) whippersnappers prefer something hotter than "your father's development platform". Specifically xBase is suspect in those circles, because it is perceived as hobbyist tool, for right or for wrong reasons.
>
>I used to think that VFP was a perfect tool for software developers in South America, Russia and the old East Block -countries, because of the cheap purchasing cost, the included IDE and turn-key database and free runtimes. This situation, however, has already changed with the new open source tools like Python or Ruby, which are completely free to acquire and to use and have a great language depth and a rapidly emerging IDE/GUI environment to boot. So, a new VFP would have to go even further than the current one AND remain extremely affordable to gain traction in those markets, as well.
>
>Regards,
>
>Pertti
>
>
>
>>Hello all.
>>There is interest from a software vendor to create an application with local data engine whic can support VFP sintax and can traslate VFP forms, reports, classes and projects directly into self contained smart -client, web applications.
>>
>>We are currently sizing the target market.
>>
>>Can you people give an idea about:
>>
>>Number of developers in the VFP community?
>>Number of day to day developers in VFP?
>>Percentage of Developers who are looking for an alternative to .NET?
>>Percentage of Developers who want to keep the local VFP capabilities (local data engine, fast development)?
>>Percentage of developer who are seious into make their applications run on Linux and Windows?
>>
>>There may be exciting news soon. If you can figure out some numbers please let me know.
>>Thanks in advance