>My experience with this has been with Microsoft's representatives who were advocating for Access and SQL Server and against FoxPro. Don't get me wrong, I am in no way a Microsoft basher. I like/love Microsoft. I don't much like what they have done to VFP, but in general I think they do a great job of both creating tools and advocating for them. They are a big company though and they seemed to be unable or unwilling to educate their other DataBase project teams on the strengths lf VFP.

Yes, the sales people rarely even knew VFP still existed. But when your pay check depends in part on what you sell, you tend to sell what makes the pay check bigger.

>MSDN subscription are expensive and if that's the only way you are going to get a copy of VFP there will be few people that will have one. What percentage of developers do you imagine have these subscriptions?

I have no concrete numbers, but my general feeling is that it is over 50%, but that includes VFP and .Net developers.

>That is true but I don't know any new work that is getting started other than in schools and in the military using these. I wasn't trying to make this point. These are points that have been made to me over the last few months by others arguing for the abandonment of VFP.

I can't comment on new work starting with COBOL and FORTRAN because I have no idea.

>Yep, I was using Function Point analysis. You can find this at: http://www.qsm.com/FPGearing.html. VFP has no equal when it comes to productivity.

That's all well and good, but looking at where they get their data could skew the results in favor of their technology of choice.

>Not at all. Just that it is much more dificult, costs more and is more dificult to maintain.

Again, I'll ask for evidence of this.

>
>Incidentally, you say that you don't think VFP will ever be what it was but, you don't offer any reasons for this. I think you are wrong. Convince me that you are not.

- VFP will never have the hundreds of thousands of developers using it as it did back when VFP 6.0 was released.
- The core product won't have significant updates.
- The number of conferences again shrunk this year (FoxForward won't be held). There is signficant content change for both the Prague and German DevCons over previous years. Both are adding more .Net and/or SQL Server.
- Both FoxPro Advisor and FoxTalk have stopped publication. FoxRockx is great, but has a limited life span.
- The number of posts on all the Fox related forums I visit seems to be down again this year (my perception).
- Corporate use will continue to decrease. We no longer have Fox development going on here.
- The Internet, and in particular, RIA, continue to rise in importance. While you can use VFP on the web, using it for RIA may be difficult if not impossible. Finding hostig companies willing to allow you to use VFP is already difficult.