>>Guys, I have run into very little FoxPro work since my lay-off back in November of last year, 2008. The jobs are becoming more and more scarce. IT Departments shoot it down. Microsoft kills it too by its decision to not market the Fox.
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>>Visual FoxPro is still an outstanding product. It is probably more popular outside of the United States and Canada than here in north America.
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>>Compared to Microsoft's .NET products, and I did research to prove this, there are few opportunities with the Fox now. When you go to, for example, http://www.indeed.com, and put in FoxPro and a city and state, FoxPro comes up with 0 to 1, or maybe as high as 2 opportunities, but Visual Basic and C# come up with 40, 50 or hundreds of opportunities depending on the city you look at. We can still build good apps in VFP, but if no one offers work in VFP, but only in JAVA, ColdFusion, VB, ASP.NET, or C#, then you have to go with the market, which in my case, means completely retraining.
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>>At age 56, it is very difficult to stop everything going on in my life and retrain mself to some other software development tool and who is going to hire a 56-year old man who just started learning C#?
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>>I guess I need some cheese with my wine, right?
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>>I've even taken California's teacher exam called CBEST in order to qualify me to teach here, but they are not hiring anyhere in the 11 school districts I've called.
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>>For years I've loved using Visual FoxPro and the old FoxPro for all of my development; it made sense.
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>>Any advice is genuinely appreciated. I am feeling kind of lost now.
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>I feel your pain.
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>The one large scale VFP project I know is going is at Amedisys in Baton Rouge. They basically do things the right way. Skill with SQL Server 2005 stored procedures is essential. The people are nice and Baton Rouge is a nice place. Contact Nicolle Psilos at TEKsystems if you are interested and in a position to work in Louisiana. They are selective -- a number of prominent members here were turned down. Daniel Aldridge can tell you a lot more, since he has been there much longer than I was.
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>Good luck!

IMHO VFP is too good to abandon. Here are two ideas that came to mind when MS foolishly dropped VFP. VFP developers can still create stand alone apps and sell or lease them. Also, hosting servers at home for businesses to use to store data will maintain control of the server side. Will VFP talk to APACHE or SAMBA servers? Developing a good sales argument and perhaps an example app that demonstrates VFP vs C++ and VB would he helpful too. PS be sure to call dot net, dot bloat and show them the difference.

There's no reason we cannot form a developer's unit within the UT and work on mutually owned software while we look for work.

How about a top ten list of reasons for using VFP over other lingos?

Part of the list should explain to company execs, that VFP does not care about purchased seats for SQL server, so the net effect of using VFP is a better bottom line for their company.