Hi John,
Great post :)

I was recently put in position to sort of defend VFP path against
'well informed' corporate audience who hv heard that 'VFP will be discontinued!' there4 going VFP path might present 'risk'.

Since I don't clutter my head with NET organics just yet, nor do I have nerves to argue VFP case with obnoxious corporate crowd, only thing that I could possibly do is present COST-RATIO for delivering and maintaining VFP system versus simillar solution done with some other (presumably NET/MSSQL) platform.
So I presented how long it took to reach given solution, what it is
capable of doing and presented future plans/timeframes together with maintenance/administration costs and indulged them basically to calculate
their costs if they were to do it themselves from scratch.

I started some time ago one thread about costs involved in achieving and
maintaining NET/MSSQL solutions but (understandably) it did not really pick up.

I believe that it would be good for VFP guys/gals outthere, if someone assembled well elaborated, general comparative costs analysis matrix in reggard of developing and maintaining VFP systems versus other platforms ;

We all know our (VFP) costs, what we need to *expose* are average NET/MSSQL costs or JAVA/XX-RDBMS or XX-DEV/ORACLE etc

And this to be close to reality in folowing respects;

1. Manpower to develop average vital bussiness system
(such are Accountings,Payrolls,StockControls,Invoicing,POS etc)

2. Licence fees involved. (10-50 users)

3. Server Administration/Maintenenace costs (Databases)


I don't expect higher level corporate audience to understand technology
aspects (they are probably fedup with IT matters), but money they usually understand very well!
There4 it might ring some bells and defend VFP guy at least in those common sense (cost-effectiveness) driven businesses.

TIA




>Dennis,
>
>NET is "the" approved route for MS faithful at the moment. That matters a lot to some of us.
>
>NET has no database. You can use NET with MySQL. If you do, the differences between VFP and NET for C/S access will be the predictable ones, namely VFP features like Remote views and large in-memory datasets that don't hog resource.
>
>Some NET fans advocate Stored Procedures as an "ideal" approach, generally using the approved database for MS faithful which is SQL Server. Obviously those SPs won't work with any other database, so if your customer wants MySQL, a rewrite would be required. It is worth noting that MySQL did not support SPs at all in previous versions, though it does support some features with stored procedures and stored functions as of V5.0.
>
>The real question revolves around customer expectation. Many of the cited advantages of NET may be irrelevant to the vast majority of customers out there, namely small business and single operators that comprise the majority of almost every economy. Whereas if your market is installed product in corporate USA, you need stratospheric confidence to advocate VFP for new development when its corporate vendor has switched it off. Meanwhile if you're providing online service, your decisions to maintain contracted delivery are your own affair. If you're supplying "mom and pop" business, you may find they've been happy with antique product running in DOS emulation on win95. What incentives do you have for upgrade? IOW there is no single "market", so promotion of a single ideal solution is a fairy tale.
>
>Finally: some "gurus" habitually scoff at mom and pop targeted developers. However, even MS is saying that the corporate market is saturated and that growth will come from smaller business. IMHO the traditional corporate gigs are ripe for outsourcing abroad because a shaved fractional saving can be worth big bucks and management is rewarded for such saving, whereas small business expects/requires local support, generally by another small business that cannot be outsourced to Madras.
>
>I think the best advice is to ignore absolute claims by anybody, including me (if you can find such a claim made by me). Information Technology has dismayingly low levels of proper science which means that most advice is anecdote or bias. You are the best judge of your own circumstance- especially your own customer base- so assess it dispassionately and decide how you can serve them best. Now is a good time to be close to your customers.
>
>Good luck!