>Hi Jos,
>
>http://www.windev.com
>
>Yeah, I came across that a few weeks back. Have u been at it? How long already? If so, I would appreciate insights on the experience!
>
>Regards
>Dennis

Upsides:

It does everything VFP does x 100
Includes own native database plus connectivity to virtually any other.
Can access VFP DBF/CDX files natively.
Winforms design and data binding like VFP.
Fully GUI.
RAD project designer
GUI database and relationship designer
Full text searching.
Breaks 2Gb database barrier.
32bit and 64bit exe.
Multi-threading.
Windows/Linux server side.
Windows/Mobile/Web client side.
Ajax, Java, PHP, Silverlight plus more integration support.
Own language which any VFP programmer will understand.
Comes integrated with many tools normally required from 3rd party suppliers e.g. FTP, encryption, email, charting, etc.
State of the art interface objects.
Multi-lingual.
Extensive help.
Royalty free distribution.
And much more.

The supplier has been in business a long time and have many big companies as clients. They are a French company with offices in various locations including US distributor.


Downside:

The IDE is developed in French and then all help files, forms, text, etc translated which means translations are not always 100% native English (not a big deal) and cool if you are French speaking.

The IDE requires a dongle to be used on the developers computer (not runtime distribution). Again not a big deal but forget about copying the product to 10 machines without paying.

There is an active forum but not like the UT. It is old style message posting but no BS, no chatter - 99% technical - http://forum.mysnip.de/list.php?27131. It is private run by the Austrian distributor. WinDev have their own forum but this one is where the WD developers go mainly. Michel, you could contact their forum admin/owner about this.

Like any product nothing is 100% bug-free but no show stoppers that I have seen.


My opinion:

Any new tool requires a learning curve. You need to find out what it has, what it can do. That takes time - IIWII. The tool you choose depends on what you want to do. If you need to have access to the maximum/broadest possible pool of developers and / or need to satisfy corporate IT departments of compliance with allowed development platforms and / or you are looking for a job in a large company – choose the Microsoft .Net, MS SQL Server or Oracle and run on Windows. If you need to have access to a large pool of developers and support, are somewhat concerned about corporate IT departments but not looking for a large corporate type of job – choose above or PHP, MySql and run on Windows or Linux. If you need to have access to enough developers or don’t care about corporate IT departments or want a very fast development time and programming environment or are developing your own packages (i.e. all the pros of why you use VFP now) then choose WinDev / WebDev. Just my 2c - YMMV.