Requires a dongle? No thanks.

>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.