Walter,

Sorry but your response shows an absolute, total, lack of understanding of reality.

I know you don't like to let reality interfere with your little happy place, but let's just try:

First, Jr's comment is a supposition on his part. Second, and this one kind of relates to the first part, a large percentage of people have moved on from Vfp in the last 10 yrs or so. I know for certain that at any dotnet event I've been to, if VFP is mentioned there's several people there who acknowledge they have programmed in VFP. And never have they mentioned that
they miss any part of VFP.

And as I mentioned before, when I've conducted interviews in the last 3 yrs or so, every resume I saw, and I mean everyone, that described a very competent VFP programmer, some one who worked on some sophisticated apps, also listed some experience with dotnet. Also, in every case, the interviewee was only covering their bases, accepting a VFP interview because they weren't sure at the time that a dotnet opportunity would come up. Never in an interview have I heard a candidate saying he wished he was still programming in VFP cause he didn't like dotnet.

I find your comments extremely myopic. VFP as a vuable tool is done, dead, put a fork in it. How many yrs ago was it that Jim Duffy stated on this site that 100% of the students at his training sessions were there to learn VFP so they could do maintenance on an existing app. No new work.

Somehow hundreds, if not thousands of developers have moved on. I'm glad for you that you ego has you believe that you are a far superior developer to all those who've moved on. But I've met quite a few people like you before. I remember back in the early days working with guys who refused to work with Windows, they loved DOS so much, or guys who never thought VFP would catch on, that Foxpro Windows/DOS was so much better.

>John,
>
>Great post, I think it summs up the answer of the question why some of those vocal .NET-ers bitch about VFP. They never unleashed the true power of it.
>
>>Recently I realized that many VFP users, including "gurus", used VFP like VB: as a front end to SP accessed via SPT, or even using ADO as recommended by one leading prophet. For such a person, moving to NET is a natural step; it truly does everything they did in VFP. This explains why some people have been saying since 1.1 that NET does everything VFP does. That's not a criticism of anybody, it's just an explanation for the heated disconnect that was so frequently seen around here.
>>
>>As for memory-disk spanning: not sure why you chose to raise it again ;-) but loading resultsets of indeterminate size and munging them repeatedly at speed without hogging resource is an awesome ability. For those who've never done it, it really is one of those "you don't know what you don't know" scenarios. MS has clearly stated its intention of providing this sort of feature in NET and if they can do it without memory-disk spanning (and several potential mechanisms have been suggested so far) then I'll happily hoot and holler (for joy) along with the best of them.
>>
>>Apart from that: I think you're completely correct in your gloomy assessment of the corporate bespoke development market, especially after the MS announcement. However, I'm not convinced that everybody in the market noticed the announcement or could care less. I guess we'll see as time goes by. IMHO the fascination with development tool is vendor driven and will dissolve as people start to rely more and more on personal devices, which MS says will be the norm within 5 years. Rather than choosing a development tool, people will choose their service provider- just as people already choose Google/online shopping etc etc without caring whether it's written in NET or Java or PHP or whatever.