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>>However, it should be fine and even desirable for people to compare the strengths and weaknesses between different languages and approaches, because that way all languages can evolve, by learning from others. It shouldn't ruffle .NET programmers' feathers if a VFP programmer points out simpler or better ways of doing things in his language of choice. And vice versa. What's the big deal?
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>There is no big deal at all. You simply pointed out how a one liner in VFP would replace all the code that Andrus posted and I simply pointed out back that you could easily achieve the same thing adding a value into a Dictionary - period.

Good to know -- so all that code was really unnecessary.

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>>It is great that you've found such success with .NET, and sounds to me like it is the best tool for the kind of application you use it for. If your company and/or your clients have the resources to invest in the training, licenses, tools and infrastructure necessary to make big applications like yours run properly, that's great. A lot of small time developers out there, however, can not sell their wares if, for example, their system requires a bunch of SQL server licenses or upgraded computers on the client site.
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>I currently work for an ISV that produces accountancy software. We support Windows versions back to Windows 2000 using .NET 1 and 2. Our applications use MySQL, as their data engine, not MS-SQL server. You can see that my employers approach makes the arguments about infrastructure, licenses, upgrades, training and so on, somewhat bogus.

You do pay license fees for commercial applications developed with MySQL, no? Of course, you could substitue a "free" backend, such as ProgressSQL pretty easily, so maybe the backend cost was not a good example. Infrastructure requirements for .NET apps are considerably higher than, say, for VFP apps, although at least in countries like the U.S. and U.K. this is becoming a moot point, as most everyone keeps updating their computers quite frequently. In many other countries, however, it is a different story (as many UT members from the Middle East, Central & South America, etc. can surely agree).


Regards,