Colin,

As a long-time developer of Foxpro/VFP and a C#/.NET/SQL developer, commercially, for around the last three years, I can tell you that of most of the work that I have been involved in, get continuously offered and am aware of from many different organizations, large and small, have never heard of Foxpro in any flavor. Guess what - they all do data and they all do fine with with what is available from .NET and a myriad of other non-VFP technologies. This doesn't take anything away from VFP - it just means that it is a very small sideshow when compared with what is happening in the rest of the world.

Wondering what to do about data outside of VFP is a total waste of energy. Data is done everywhere in different ways and developers simply get used to what they know. I think this is equally true of VFP developers. I remember doing all kinds of things in VFP and really pushing it to its limits. I still create similar applications to before, except that they are generally much larger now and scale. Somehow, I manage to do them without VFP :)

If you are being "steered towards a VFP front end and a SQL server back end", then it suggests you are not using this combination right now. If you haven't got VFP skills, then I would recommend investing your time and effort into a more marketable and in-demand technology choice. As to SQL server at the back end - you can use it, or many other extremely good SQL back-ends, many of which are totally free and offer considerable advantage(s) over the the native Fox .dbf/table.

Just my tuppence worth.

-=Gary


>Seems to be a lot of negative stuff floating aroud about .NET data handling - there are thousands of VFP users out there wondering what to do and whild there is a lot of talk no one seems to be really addressesing data handling as you say
>
>Let me ask you a question to clarify my own mind - what would be your order of preference for data handling capability and why?
>
>VFP table / database / sql
>SQL Server
>.NET
>
>I am being steered towards a VFP front end and a SQL server back end - what's you take on this
>
>Colin
>
>>>Data handling is never, ever, ever brought up as a big issue. Dotnet programmers seem to be making out just fine without "Auto-spanning.......".
>>
>>I've showed a bunch of .NET developers how data is manipulated in VFP. Generally it leaves them dumbfounded. Most don't know what they are missing.

-=Gary