That's interesting to hear. I haven't attended anything Foxpro related in awhile. So I haven't been hanging around those one-man shops.

I even ran into a guy at a dotnet event a couple months ago who had a small company that taught a VFP class I took when I first moved to CA 18 yrs ago. He had a junior developer at the event we were at who works with him. I haven't met anyone at a dotnet event other then guys looking for a contract who work by themselves.


>All good points Perry. Over the past year I've been contacted by developers who work independently and asked to be their backup. Customers (even smaller ones) are shying away from 'one-man' shops and want proof of additional resources. With the VFP pool getting smaller and smaller, that is getting more difficult to do.
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>>Steve,
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>>A couple points for this discussion:
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• Corporations started abandoning VFP about 12 yrs ago or so. And they are not coming back. For a couple of the reasons mentioned below

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• The size of the VFP developer pool is small and getting smaller. Both because of people leaving for other tools, and because VFP developers skew older. And as they retire, they are not being replaced.

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• Tool consistency. If you know Java, you are a very big way towards knowing C# and vice versa. In many ways VFP development is done much differently then other tools. Many here have stated they were involved in an example of showing someone else how VFP works and they were amazed. But I think the reverse, where the non-VFP person is not all that impressed happens a lot more.

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• Corporations and actually any company with any size to their IT dept will shy away from VFP because of the shrinking developer pool. Having a large pool of developers to choose from come hiring time is extremely important to them.
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• DBf structures. I think for everyone you can find who says they've not had any problems with getting corrupted DBFs you can find 5 who say they've had a lot of problems with it.

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• Back to corporations. Even for those companies who develop shrink wrapped solutions saying your product is written in VFP could be a problem. Many companies have VFP on their do not use list. Meaning not only can it not be used internally, but the company is not allowed to purchase software written in VFP. You can witness this by looking at some off the shelf accounting software. A couple years ago, it might have been written in VFP. But now they push their enterprise version, written in dotnet with a sql server backend

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• Based on the shrinking pool of developers, I think that even consultants need to make their clients aware that they are planning on using VFP as the development tool. But that might make future support more difficult.
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>>>Dave,
>>>
>>>>>www.west-wind.com has built a vibrant community...
>>>>>its partially based on VFP and partially based on
>>>>>.NET. You'll find lots of interesting and exciting
>>>>>new developments on that site.
>>>
>>>I agree. I like Rick's approach. I would probably only point out that Rick's 'community' isn't (or shouldn't be) different than the VFP community at large. We all ought to be using the 'best tool for the job' and that tool isn't always C++.Net, C#.Net or VB.Net. Sometimes it's VFP or Java. If we are not then we are doing ourselves and our customers a disservice.
>>>
>>>Thanks,
>>>
>>>Steve