>Hi Guys
>Thanks to all of you who took the trouble to reply and discuss my query.
>I am not a contractor, nor do I do work on other apps and yes FPW was an abomination. I started building my (large) accounting and job costing program 17 years ago because anything else was junk in my opinion. Now I have a robust Vfp8 application which my clients love me for and pay me a nice monthly fee. Everything was rosy until one of my clients ran it on Terminal Services. Lost that client because of the dreaded 'Error can't find file' error which it appears is a TS bug when running VFP (all versions). Now another large client is running TS and my data integrity has become a worry. After many years of a robust APP I am now losing confidence. While the Fox community pooh poohed the TS bug, non Fox people were telling my clients that VFP and TS is not a good partnership. I am starting to agree.
>First thing I will have to do is rewrite my 17 years of work. Yes I have heard about the .NET Vfp compilier, but I am going to have to re-write the whole thing in order to make it work on SQL Server or similar anyhow so my current thinking is might as well bite the bullet and learn something more modern. Because a program such as mine together with it's client base and regular income is a saleable commodity when I become too old and doddery to cope anymore (closer than I dare admit) I am informed on extremely good authority that the thing must be written in current month flavour to attract a buyer. VFP is definately not on the current flavour variety menu right now.
>So in the end; hate Microsoft all you like, I have listened to the 'MS demise is just around the corner' for years now, but like the end of the world it never comes. Some of my friends have gone to what I think of as spongy alternatives like Delphi etc, but they are a bit off beat in my opinion. My current thinking is to stick stubbornly with VFP is like driving my car into a gradually worsening bog.
>BTW My first large statement print took 8 hours using SQL syntax, a friend showed me how to use SEEK and SCAN REST WHILE, the print run dropped to 10 minutes. Bet you can't do that in SQL Server!
>I guess I am answering my own question, but one does appreciate the opinions of others and I try to take it all into account.
>Cheers, John

Your situation sounds very similar to my own. I have a number of commercial apps that have been developed and updated over the last 25 years that would need to be re-written if I stopped using VFP9. There are some huge questions in this regards that would have to be answered before a new development platform could be selected.

1. Two of our applications maintains a number of files for each client that the user wants to maintain records for. Think of an accounting system that is used by an accountant to maintain a (for example) general ledger for the client. By necessity, we have used VFP to create a number of files for each client without stuffing each client in a separate directory. Can SQL server do that? In fact, there aren't many DBMS that can do that as far as I know. Naturally, we've had to use free tables for this purpose, and even though some of these tables contains thousands of records, through the clever (or not so clever) use of indexes and cursors, we've been able to keep our apps faster than the competition.

2. We would have to incorporate the same functionality in our new apps that currently exists in our present apps. Many of the features have been adapted from the flexibility and features found in VFP, so we'd have to ensure that this same functionality exists in a new development tool. Anyone found one of these yet?

3. We have some very, very sophisticated reports that have taken months to design and implement. And we've learned lots of things about the report writer in VFP that allowed us to generate reports that our competition don't have. Unlike a lot of applications, our reports are NOT just lists of data, but contain business data that companies use to make business decisions with. Duplicating some of these reports would be a real big job!

Naturally, if we can leverage anything we have already done or learned to make the conversion easier, this would be a huge plus, but honestly, what are the choices right now. MS has really left us in a pickle and staying in the MS camp is really going to take some convincing.

We continue to watch what's out there as an alternative, but haven't really found anything that makes sense just yet. If you've got anything you would recommend, I'm all ears.