Hi Jeff,

You're right... I've had my experience with financial institutes like banks and insurance companies, Lots of the them at that time were using VFP, or even FPW for that matter. Large applications with medium size teams with well seasoned VFP developers. Often they came from the clipper environment. Most of the people I met there I ever met I never saw online here. Only a handfull of the Dutch developers I've ever seen online.

The fact is that a lot of people here seem to live on short term projects and need to follow the new work using the latests and (not so) greatest technologies. Well for them, they might not have a choice.

For others, they are making a living out of longer term jobs. I've been working for 7 straight years on a particular project. Before that about 4 years on another and before that about 8 years as well. For me there is a great need to understand the business I'm dealing with. Bleeding edge technology is not what my customers require. They want to have their business processes automated and maintained.

Call it a niche..... well I've got news for all the 'Fox is dead whiners'. The money is in the niches. The more people get away from VFP, the more work there is for me. The wages will increase as well as it did with COBOL programmers. There always will be support for those applications that won't be converted away from VFP anytime soon. In our company we have a small team of VFP developers where two of them were trained in recent years to develop VFP. Both are great assets.

Would we write this huge application in VFP if we were to start today? Probably not. But at the time this application was developed, about 1997, it made perfect sense. Even today, I'm learning new things every day, esspecially on architecture, but also functionality of VFP I never looked into until recently.

Personally, I don't like the new development trends at microsoft at all. I never was a fan of strict type languages because of the level of energy you put into making the compiler happy is not my defintion of being productive. Also when I read that in some of those bleeding edge languages you need to 'hand code' a GUI, I really think we are getting backward. If I in 2002 were to switch to .NET 1.x using winforms, I only would have learned that new technologies can have a verey limited timespan as well. Winforms is dead as well, not to mention the whole bunch of data binding and processing techniques. Fine if you were to develop a single application in a short timespan and be done with it, but has absolutely no value if you have to write a huge application that you'll have to maintain the next 10 to 20 years. People using the same .NET techniques of 8 years ago might be even more rare than seasoned VFP developers.

Walter,