I have seen many failed VB rewrites of FP and VFP applications.

My experience is that mom and pop stores do not care what development language is used to write applications to run their business. Now when it comes to corporate America, that is a different tune!

Mom and pop do not get attention from the Microsoft sales types – too small a market. Now corporate America is another story! Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, Microsoft sales types for years would convince corporate IT to not use VFP. To compete with Oracle, you have to sell product and VFP just does not bring in the revenue like SQL Server.

You have a corporation (Microsoft) attempting to increase profits by selling products that bring in a more revenue. I am not sure how Microsoft pays its sales types. Commission? Revenue? Why sell an inexpensive product when you have the attention of IT and they will listen?

Perception is very important. Corporate America takes advice from “experts” in the field. Microsoft says… and industry responds.




>>All corporate America (in my case) has heard since VFP 3 is how great Visual Studio (VB) and .NET is and how they should be using those tools.
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>>You won't sell much VFP that way.
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>I did my first VFP app after working with it for about a year.
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>It took me 6 weeks.
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>Granted I'd be embarrassed to show it today, but it worked.
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>Some corporate type, after reading the ads and propaganda from MS said it had to be re-written in VB and SQL Server. At least 6 months after starting the re-write, the much more expensive consultants and corporate types with much more computer experience than I, had not completed the re-write.
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>I had gone to a seminar on Lotus Notes and had suggested to management that they could save money on corporate mail by distributing it through Lotus Notes.
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>I moved on, last I heard the people that were going to re-write my app were re-assigned to administering Lotus Notes and would not be handling custom apps.
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>My biggest problem was the perception that they had of what was going on with FoxPro.