>>>>For businesses offering solutions to vertical markets. VFP is still a viable development environment.
>>>>
>>>>That's hotly debatable - I have direct knowledge where vendors lost sales because their vertical market application used Fox. (In some cases, it was because the application used Fox for data storage...in other cases, even though the VFP app worked with SQL Server, the vendor still lost business).
>>>>
>>>>There may be factors that will improve the odds of getting a sale of a VFP app (how much or how little the app will interface with other aspects of the business) - but I can tell you with certainty that potential customers are more likely to look at the development tool for the vertical app than they were, say, 7-10 years ago.
>>>
>>>Yeah very debatable. I think if you had a VFP app and a .NET app that both do pretty much the same thing then I would expect businesses to want the .NET version.
>>
>>So much of this is influenced by your market. When we were a VFP shop, hardly anyone asked or cared what the app was written in. Heck, most of them would not have ever thought to ask the question. In the 12 years I was the lead, the issue was raised exactly once (out of > 800 paying clients).
>>
>>What they wanted was software that worked and good support (we knew their business, provided an 800 number and English was our first language).
>
>Victor
>
>Couldn't agree more. The only ones that seem concerned about what an app is developed with is enterprise type clients.
>
>I'm continuing to develop with VFP and still selling (daily) an application that is 25 years old for almost $ 600 a copy. When we first started selling our application, there used to be a few inquires about our development language and we proudly said Foxpro (because it was a Microsoft product), but in the last 5 - 10 years, our users pay more attention to what our app can do rather than what it's written in. We have features that would take years to develop in another language. VFP is still a very flexible and great development tool for the desktop.
>
>We are in the process of developing an application or two with Alpha 5, Version 10. There was a recent article in Infoworld about how it can be used to develop ajax applications with NO coding. One of the comments to the article was posted by someone who claimed to be from Microsoft. He claimed that they were using it to develop web applications because their products would require considerably more effort and time.
>
>For those who aren't drunk from drinking too much coolaid, here's a link to the article.
>
>http://infoworld.com/d/developer-world/year-ajax-and-rest-services-090
>
>Be sure to read the comments... all of them.


I liked the name of their server side language ;)
XBASIC sounds very promissing! Eventually it might turn into something quiet foxy huh ? ;)

I can already imagine some future development tool/platform where I am develping server side of my web application (biz objects) in something that look very very much like FoxPro base language (without current UI) , data gets stored to the database of my
choice with all concurency issues being resolved without me having to mess with it, while I am getting all kinds of web interface gadgets easily bound to my temporary cursors, arrays etc.

Web apps will be as fast & snappy as our VFP apps are today but it will be all web based.
To bad this 'revolutionary' technology is NOT going to be developed & sold by M$ but by someone else.

FoxPro is dead / Long live Fox :))