John,

I think vertical market and shrink wrap software makers will be some of the final holdouts for converting to new technology, simply because we have such a large investment in existing code. Win32 is still king right now and the pressure is on to create new features, not move to the latest technology. "Look at me, I'm .NET!" doesn't sell a lot of software in my neck of the woods. Even Microsoft hasn't moved all of their business applications to .NET yet, although I imagine they are working on it. It can be a huge effort for any size company.

At the same time, I think it is wise to learn about the newer technologies, even if it's just tinkering. Eventually, current VFP capabilities will not be acceptable in the marketplace, in the same way DOS and Windows 3.1 apps would be a hard sell right now. As next generation user interfaces like WPF become more popular, you don't want your app to look pale by comparison. Maybe by then VFPX will have comparable native controls for us or Etecnologia will have completed the .NET compiler. Still, I like to keep an eye on other technologies and see how well they work with VFP. I plan for that to be a common theme on my new blog (http://weblogs.foxite.com/joel_leach/).

Bottom line: No one knows your customers, your market, or your technology needs better than you do. There's a lot of uncertainty since Microsoft decided to stop development on VFP, but if/when the time comes to make a change, you'll know it.

>Joel
>
>You are a breadth of fresh air if for no reason other than you face the same situation that I do. I have a software product that is in it's 24th year and is very much vertical. We have updated this product every year and added new features and reports. There are literally over a hundred reports in our application when you consider all the permutations.
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>Our users are no different than yours... they don't care what it's written in, they only care if it works, how fast it does what it's supposed to do, and how easy it is to use.
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>With only 3-4 programmers, we can't take months, years, whatever to learn a technology like .NET just so we can say that we are using the latest and greatest. Not without first knowing that it will allow us to do some things that we can't do right now in VFP. I haven't heard anyone say that yet.
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>Sitting on your laurels may be the best advice as of right now.
>
>>John,
>>
>>Therein lies the problem. There is no other VFP, nor is there currently an easy migration path to something else. You can imagine why that might be upsetting. What you can do is exactly what you are doing: start examining the various technologies out there and determine the best path based on your needs.
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>>Personally, I'm taking a wait-and-see approach. VFP is still a viable platform for us and will continue to be for some time. As a vertical market provider, our clients are clamoring for new features, not a new platform. We have a 25 year investment in our code base, and we can't afford to take two or more years off to rewrite it in something else. There's going to have to be some kind of migration path. I'm interested to see how close Etecnologia can get to their goal of 100% compatibility with Fox. We also have the option of putting a shiny new WPF/Silverlight/Whatever (if not GDIPlusX) front end on our Fox app, so it looks the part. Fortunately, we have time to see how things go, so no rush.
>>