>Forgive me if I am dredging up a topic that’s been discussed.
>
>I’ve been working with VFP, well, dBase, since the early 80s, then Clipper, then VFP. It’s been a 24-year experience with several breaks here and there as an assembly language programmer (I used to write compilers for years).
>
>Now I’m moving nicely into c#, liking it, things are going well, my company is converting VFP applications to c#, it’s a year long effort… but we’re moving right along, making the investment, like you are too probably. Visual Studio is a nice product.
>
>Lately I’m noticing, with increasing frequency, Microsoft now has many applications that compete with my company’s applications. I see Microsoft has retail management software, wholesale and manufacturing software, etc… These are products with the Microsoft nametag (including but not limited to Dynamics, Navision, RMS, Great Plains, etc…).
>
>So while my company is taking a year off to convert from VFP to c#, Microsoft sells competing products in my market. And oh, incidentally, it’s a coincidence they knocked out a lot of competing products written in VFP by discontinuing the VFP language (which they paid millions for ten years earlier).
>
>Since my company pays a lot of taxes (a lot to me) and has a bunch of employees, I contacted my state’s senators regarding monopolistic and unfair practices, specifically regarding the VFP language shut-down, which puts companies with VFP products at least a year behind competing Microsoft products. I’m not a lawyer, but it seemed unfair to me.
>
>My contact was well received (by one of them, the other one was very busy) and my issue was sent (CC me in writing) to the DOJ and several other federal agencies. In fact, I received letters from each agency stating it was being past along to a different office for review since it was not for their department…
>
>All of this was well over one year ago… needless to say, nothing has happened. Not surprised either.
>
>I was thinking of contacting the senators (the busy one may not be so busy any more) again to ask, through the freedom of information act, to see the results of the investigation, but I don’t really think it matters.
>
>Sorry guys, I guess I’m just venting.
>
>Any of you seeing patterns in the sand like I am or have I been programming just a wee bit too long? Set me straight.

You're history with dbase, Clipper, vfp mirrors my own. I've been very pleased with the VFP development platform and have already started looking for a new development platform. After all, who wants to write something today in VFP only to have to re-write it in a few years. Like you, we've already determined that it will take years just to re-write what we already have.

So the decision now comes down to .NET or something else. The first question that jumps into my mind is do I really want to trust Microsoft to protect my investment of time and money by using one of their products again? Granted, .NET may be an outstanding product, but just the learning curve puts me behind by years.

That's why I started to look at some other products and the one that has intrigued me the most is Alpha Five. Sure, you've heard of it before if you've been around the VFP world for any length of time. I remember it from many years ago, but always thought of it as an enduser tool, kind of like Access. Well, it was purchased by a couple of brothers a few years back and they have really turned it into a true development platform for both desktop and web applications. The learning cure is very gentle and in no time at all, you'll be creating forms and reports, and web applications that would take you months of learning just to get your foot in the door.

It has native support for dbf's built in, granted it's the 2.6 version of the dbf's, which is another reason I started thinking about NOT using .NET. When MS modified the native dbf, they literally turned it into a proprietary format that few if any 3rd party applications support. Was this planned? Who knows. All I know is they didn't even build in support for VFP tables in their own products - i.e. Excel 2007.

So, while going back to the old dbf format may be a problem, at least I'm going back to one that is supported by a host of other products. Alpha Five, in their wisdom, built in support for ADO, so you can access VFP tables using VFPOLEDB and it works very well, thank you very much.

In a matter of a week, we were able to build a very simple, but sophisticated app that we thought would take 6 months to develop in ASP.NET.

Don't get me wrong, their are some notable sacrifices that you have to make, but there are more than enough notable enhancements that VFP never implemented. It has a very sophisticated xbasic (similar to Visual Basic) programming language that can be used to do some very complicated things.

Perhaps one of the biggest attractions of Alpha Five is the message board. Reminds me a lot of the UT. I know I've posted a ton of questions and gotten solid, reliable, and quick answers from top level Alpha programmers. When you start to look through the tons of functions that are built in, in addition to the native dbf support, you'll quickly find similar functions to do the same thing that good old reliable VFP provides. We were shocked when we had to convert some VFP code to xbasic only to find that it literally worked exactly the way it was in VFP.

It is NOT object oriented, but it is object based; which means that if you are developing business applications, chances are you can create applications quickly and with the same polish that you did in vfp.

Now here is the really neat thing. The same development tool can be used to create desktop apps OR web apps. Pretty remarkable. The web app IDE is even more object oriented than the desktop side of it.

There is a free trial, tons of video on their site demonstrating many of the things that you can do with Alpha Five, and the runtime is very reasonably priced. Each web server requires a license, but they do have an unlimited runtime for desktop apps.

I forgot to mention, it also has native support for a number of SQL databases including SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and some others. My recommendation is to check out their site and see what it has to offer in terms of cost, features, and an alternative to going to bed with someone who is NOT your competitor and won't leave you out in the lurch.