Very good post John. There clearly is a difference between getting something done quickly based on a business request vs writting a new large scale system from scratch or rewritting a big system. Certainly VFP and/or NET is not always the answer as it depends on the customers needs.

John, I do wonder if you do find a viable alternative to VFP will you stay on the VFP section of the UT and continue to beat down for years those that do not follow you to the new promised land? Where are those today that followed the advice of one such advocate leading them to the promised land of Visual Basic 6.0 hmmm? If one of the reasons given to not create a new version of VFP is that there is nothing much new to add to the product as it is mature and nearly feature complete - is that not a good thing in some ways?

If you can kill a fly with a fly swatter should you not really kill a fly with a stick of dynomite? They both get the job done one with excessive force and perhaps a few casualties, but they both do work. Extending that thought process, why not just drop an atomic bomb on the house - kill them all and some surrounding inhabitants?

Those that think a combination of NET and SQL server can do battle in the true enterprise are also mistaken. Products like Teradata and SAS running on massive UNIX or mainframe platforms can handle terabytes of data that chock lesser products like SQL Server and Oracle. So why not go with the best, most industrial strength products from the get go? Could it be that Teradata and it massively parallel processing requires special disks that cost about $1 million per terabyte?

There is a time and place for everything - in the mean time perhaps you can continue to stop our pesky little friends with a flyswatter by consitently defeating them as you do in these debates until they eventually move to the promised land of pure NET...

>Walter, back in 2003 I received an unhappy e-mail from a fellow UT'er saying how he'd lost business because a prominent (ex)-VFP guru had trashed VFP to the customer and promoted Stored Procedures and NET. Apparently the customer got scared +++ and chose neither of them after having almost signed with the VFP crew. That's a very big and very real risk, especially since MS's "diwfp" treatment (damn it with faint praise) is now likely to be an obituary notice from customer-facing functionaries in local MS branches. For generic IT consultants, that's a "game over" issue.
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>IMHO that explains the comprehension rift here. People whose value proposition is "expertise in this or that tool" rather than "expertise in this business niche" have little choice but to follow vendor signals- preferably as early adopters to cherry-pick the best opportunities and earn revenue from those who come after. There's nothing wrong with that, just as there's nothing wrong with continuing to use VFP if it makes best business sense with your domain expertise and customer relationships. As always, the problem comes when individuals assume that their own anecdote is the only truth out there. No I'm not saying you did that ;-) I'm just saying that there is a reason why this difference of opinion seems to keep arising.