>Hello All,
>I am currently employed by a company that has a very large VFP application with over 100 customers. We are very much aware of the status of VFP and are looking to convert to a new front end (we use MSSql 2005 as a backend). Are there any tools currently on teh market (or indevelopment) that cound translate our VFP code to their platform. Obviously we wound not expect 100% but at least get us halfway there (.NET or something else). This is a desktop application and we are NOT looking to make this web based.
>
>Thanks
>Sandy
Besides translators there are other options.
Microsoft has the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 that allows you to create Forms and UserControls in .NET and use them in VB 6.0 or VFP. I have not tried the actual forms but UserControls work well. Just create the UserControl with all the controls you would put on a full form. Then wrap it in an Interop UserControl then build. Then go to VFP drop an OLE control on a form and your .NET UserControl will show up in the list. The templates are all in VB.NET, but others on the web have created c# templates.
eTecnologia also has the .NET extender which is a complete product that basically does the same thing, but makes it easier to avoid COM registration.
This lets you gradually upgrade your application one module at a time. When you are completely in .NET just drop your UserControls on .NET forms and your ready to go as a pure .NET.
As others have mentioned
www.vfpconversion.com has some good information on this approach. Rick Strahl has some good articles there and on his web site that go over how to pass complex objects between VFP and .NET and how to fire events in .NET and pick them up in VFP.
I am currently taking this rout on a project. I have the DevForce framework running in VFP accessing VFP tables with the Advantage OLEDB Drivers. Its working quite well for me.