Gary,

>In case it is lost on you, I developed using Foxpro/VFP since circa 1989/1995 respectively. So, I am aware of the arguments from both sides of the fence. I just think that for Perrti to glibly make reference to the AddProperty function and compare it to the lines of code that Andrus produced for Alex needed squaring off somewhat.

I know gary... but my reply is NOT AN ATTACK ON .NET... please re-read my reply. It is an attack on the statment that "only VFP programmers come with such questions"...

>It seems that a lot of Fox devs seem to be placing high hopes on the "ethnologica" offering to keep themselves relevant going forward - I sincerely hope that they are backing the right horse and that the company in question realize a commercial advantage for their efforts in trying to do what MS was not prepared to do. The Fox community tend to like things "for free" and as much of the Fox third party market realized over the years, if it isn't cheap, it won't sell. Time will tell.

Again, you did not read my reply correctly. Where did I say that place high hopes in ethnologica ?? The only statment I made here is that dynamic languages *CAN* have type checking on compile time, as this company has proven. This is all I've said nothing more and nothing less.

>I guess I made all the same arguments that you and others make for VFP's superiority and I argued with you and for you against the likes of JVP and the PA crew. However, after using .NET in many commercial environments, I can tell you that there is no occasion that I have ever wished I had VFP to handle the job. I have seen your arguments about how you can only do your data-intensive stuff using VFP and if that is your experience, then good for you. However, a number of applications that I have been involved with have been to replace VFP applications in enterprise-scale environments. The Fox developers sniggered and sneered that we would fail for many of the data oriented reasons you have cited. However, they were wrong and the systems succeeded over and above expectations. Those companies no longer employ VFP developers ... 'nuff said.

This is not about the argument made here. If the above is your experience then good for you. I've seen (and others on the forum here as well) a number of cases where this was different. Regardless, it is not that you cannot do something in the other language, but it takes more effort to do certain stuff (for example post processing of local data).

The point is that comments like "I only hear VFP-ers make this argument, while in the rest of the IT world it does seem to be an issue" should be examined carefully before concluding something.

LINQ is filling a gap that VFP/FOX had since decades. MS finally confirmed this to be valuable and included this in the language. I've had many discussions with members up here that local data processing is valuable before LINQ showed up and MS has proven that to be correct despite the argument "No-one in the rest of the IT world thinks this is an issue": Just because you don't know what you don't know

Also, the DLR is added to .net to provide more easy implementation of dynamic languages. MS has may have dropped VFP from it developer tools list, but certainly not the dynamic languages. To me the dynamic language with code- and compile time type checking is the future of all development tools, not the strict type languages like the current implementations of C# and VB.NET.

Walter