Hi Derek,

I agree.

I have high regards for VFP and high respect for the amazingly friendly and helpful VFP developers that you find in forums like this. And it sounds like you do also. I've met many of the Lords of FoxPro (as I like to call them) in Boston Area User Group meetings and a few conferences I attended. Whether they're speakers and authors, or just one of us regular developers, almost every person I've ever met in this community has been genuinely wonderful.

It's personally and professionally painful to see VFP hit this stage where it will not be carried forward into the 64bit world. No matter how much we love the product, in the end of the day we have to be responsive to customers (or employers). In some cases doing work in VFP still makes sense. And I enjoy it when it does. In some cases, it doesn't make sense. So far, for me personally, when it's decided that VFP will not be the tool of choice, it's because of customer perception about VFP and where it will leave them in the future, as opposed to a technical shortcoming of VFP to create the current solution. It kind of makes me sad. But on the other hand, it forces me (all of us?) to consider the choices available for tools and languages. What a great opportunity to step back and thoughtfully position ourselves for the future.

It sounds like you take a similar stance with customers. It seems like the smart thing to do for the long term.

Guy





>Guy
>
>As you pointed out, this is the last place on earth you're likely to hear predominantly subjective views on the continued use of VFP. I rarer post, although I do regularly view, and I have always found this forum to be very biased (as you'd probably have expected, given that it's a VFP forum).
>
>In reality, as a responsible IT Professional, we have a duty to inform our clients that VFP has a finite shelf-life; to do otherwise would be unprofessional and morally wrong, in my opinion, and not least that every day another VFP programmer will migrate to a newer language and so the pool of available talent is ever diminishing. There will always be VFP programmers, so you could argue that the business will not be at risk, but that's not an acceptable reason to keep our clients informed of the situation. If the client finds this acceptable, then VFP lives on, but in my experience (and I have told all of my clients this) they'll almost all want to move to something that has a longer shelf-life.
>
>I still use VFP, to support legacy applications, and I'm currently using it to build a new version, but only because the project has taken 3 years longer than it should have; in reality, both the client and I wish to move the application away from VFP (probably onto C#) at the earliest possible point. As programmers we should be looking at ourselves to improve, move with the times etc, so the onus should be on us to continue to push the envelope.
>
>I await the undoubted flaming.
>
>Regards