As for my rates, that's a little personal unless you are planning on hiring me. Though I'd be happy to bid any project you might need help on. :) Lest you accuse me of completely copping out on your question, I make a very good living that most doctors and lawyers would be quite pleased with. In general, most of the VFP developers I know make between 70 and 125 an hour depending on how good they are and the standard of living for the area that they work in. Now, granted most of the VFP developers I know are MVPs or quite talented, but I can only talk from my own perspective and not something I read on some salary survey somewhere. The .NET developers I know make comparable rates. This is of course talking about hourly wages and doesn't speak to bidded projects where the real money is and always will be as it is with creating a successful vertical market application with mass appeal.
As for multi-developer projects... I work alone or with a small group of developers. None of the projects I work on (C#, C++ or VFP) have a huge number of developers. This is because I don't market myself towards those kinds of projects. Size of the companies I do projects for are Fortune 10 to companies of 1.
They use a variety of backends... flatfile (dbf, XML, etc.), MySQL, and SQL Server.
In addiion, I'm doing C++/C# desktop apps, mobile apps, libraries, and a few hybrid applications combining .NET with VFP.
I wake up every day in a huge house with a pool, kiss my smokin wife and adorable children, drive around town in my black Hummer or 300C, write code at a company I own, and thank God for this incredible life. Is VFP still lucrative? For me it is. Is .NET lucrative? For me it is too. I can only speak for myself and make good business decisions for SweetPotato Software. My suggestion to any business person (developer or otherwise) is to make good business decisions based on sound reasoning. Why do I continue espousing VFP? Yep, because it continues to be a good business decision for me and the customers that hire me.
In my spare time (if that's any indication of what I'm hedging my bets with) I work extensively with the VSSDK (VSX) and the DDK (mostly minifilters)?
So, in the interest of keeping this discussion friendly... what are you working on these days? What do you see as good opportunities in the years to come for talented Windows developers? Anything that you've been working on in your spare time that really has your interest these days?
>
With MS extended support until 2015 and being unrivaled when it comes to creating desktop database applications, I'm having to beat new customers and new (long term and short term) Visual FoxPro projects off with a stick. >
>Out of curiosity,
>
>- What kind of rates are you getting with these clients?
>
>- Are these multi-developer projects, or are you working solo?
>
>- Do these have a SQL (or Oracle, etc.) back-end, or are they using DBFs?
>
>Thanks,
>Kevin
