>>>Yesterday in a meeting with a new face at a Client's office he said "FoxPro is the software no one uses any more". Fortunately someone else remarked that the main purpose of the software was to get the job done and that it was doing the job very well.
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>>>You all must have come across this situation. What answers have you given and what software have Clients suggested as being better than VFP and for what reasons?
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>>Would you buy a new car that the dealer won't support? Would you buy a major appliance with no warrenty? Would you invest in decades old technology when something newer exists?
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>>I made my living for 15 years using FoxPLUS to VFP. It was a great tool. It was.
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>>No company in their right mind would invest in a product that has no future. Remember, companies investing in IT infrastructure, software included, want to be cutting edge and forward looking. VFP has been retired so it's no longer a viable solution.
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>I don't typically buy new cars -- they are too expensive and loose too much of their value when driven off the lot. A car a few years older will work just as well and can be just as nice in features. The older car gets the job done just as well as the new car.
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>With that said, I am interested in getting the job done and done well. Newer compilers does not necessarily mean better -- the older may be better or equal (and it can be inferior too). The ability of VFP to produce programs that "look-n-feel" the same as .Net is possible. So I don't see where the old is inferior to the new yet. I remember a programmer that years ago would write windows programs (32-bit) in all Assembler which is very old code. Those programs were smaller and would run circles around any equivalent C/C++ compiled program -- which was better?
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>Each has to decide what business factors dictate the language. Having a skill in a language certainly "pushes" that ahead, but you might want some other feature in the other language. So you switch. As for .Net, what's to say that MS will not change that in a few years for the next "great" coding scheme. First it was assembler, then cobol, then fortran, then pascal, then C, then C++, then java, then .Net (trying to be like java); with xBase and Visual Basic somewhere in the mix. What will be next? If you are going to change, I would consider moving away from a specific vendor implementation -- that makes java a possibility and its cross-platform. Will MS continue to dominate the OS? Or will another emerge?
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>I would say build now with what gets the job done and done well. That means being able to code quickly and efficiently. Also the UI has to be good. So, pick your compilers....

No one is saying the old (VFP) is inferior to the new. Just that the old generally isn't wanted any more, for reasons having little to do with technology.