This is pretty much an example of why I'll read any message with your name on it <g>

>Hey buddy,
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>FWIW what I remember from that time period is a bit different or the same from a different facet. A lot of the Fox all-stars welcomed the paradigm shift because it would roadblock the casual programmers and elevate the true professionals. I know that sounds horrible but I seem to recall a lot of sotto voce "this will separate the men from the boys" talk. Similiar to what we saw a few year back with the early adopters of VB .Net versus classic VB.
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>I have to admit that I was in that crowd. If it required rewired thinking and an understanding of OOP, so be it. If some folks were kicked to the curb...well....that's darwinism for you. Many of us came from hobbyist backgrounds and were very eager to be seen as professional masters of a new, profesionnal tool.
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>I wasn't at the cons at the time because I was running a company (I sent folks, though) but it seems to me by the time VFP 6 rolled out the attitude had shifted back to the lifeboat mentality and everyone wanted everyone to understand everything. For example, in Palm Springs the talk was all about Office automation via COM and MSMQ...which almost no one understood but we all tried to get them to (heh).
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>About that time, also, we had the era of academic but functionally BS app designs, too. The OOP Nazis. Class usage that would have made Ivar Jacobsen or Grady Booch all warm and fuzzy but suffered in the real world. Good DBAs know when to denormalize but a lot of folks hadn't figured out yet how to de-objectify.
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>I said it in another branch to this thread and I'll say it again: The paradigm shift has come. You had to go from 2.6 to VFP and now you have to go to .Net. I don't like it and you don't like it. But it''s reality. It's scary; a few years ago you could put 10 years of VFP on your curriculum vitae and be a god...now you're a curiosity. If you want to stay in this career field you have to body-surf the trends. In terms of functionality and desktop apps VFP lives. In terms of career progression and relevency VFP is dead, dead, dead. I wish it weren't so.
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>>>The thing I remember most vividly about the roll out of VFP 3 was the "paradigm shift" where the first thing you heard about at Virginia Beach and Foxteach and Whilfest was about OO - examples ( from Booth, Menachim, Hozier, Speedie et al ) being very OO but not at all relevant to normalized data. ( Customer objects, invoice objects etc ) with no real explanation of the ORM that would have made it all relevant to the normalized data tables we were used to working with.
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>>>And then there was the talk of subclassing - and frameworks. The first thing you were supposed to do was build a set of class libraries, frameworks etc. And this got a lot of people who had heard of OO about an hour before that thinking they were capable of doing just that. And hey,they had Tastrade to show them how.
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>>>( oh yeah, and I remember getting smacked down by Speedie on CIS when he announced he was doing a "Tour to introduce VFP 3.0 Beta" at which everyone would get a Master set of the Beta and I expressed enthusiasm for the Speedie Master Beta Tour - FHIHCTAJ )
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>>I remember those days well. I can recall having very long discussions with the likes of Speedie, Black, Griver, the Feltmans, and Menachim about how to divide up the furtile ground of OO into reasonable chuncks that could be digested by the masses fairly easily without putting everyone in the room into information overload. I especially recall handling some questions from attendees that were really very good questions but whose acurrate answers would take volumes to present. How we made it through that time period I will never quite understand.
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>>Still, today, I see the questions from some of the newbies that reak of, "Oh if I only had the time to tell you the whole story behind that your mind would explode."