>Delphi was a GREAT product.
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>Yes, it was. And Borland was aggressively targeting FP people to capitalize on unease about MS's intentions and try to build movement towards Delphi. They took some of us on week-long retreats with gurus. Performance was great and it all looked really easy when demonstrated. The only reason I didn't move was: data. Delphi's C/S data handling could not match the VFP Beta.
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>Perhaps people forget that despite all the subsequent downgrading, the RV allowed you to write apps with free change handling and 100% sql-injection-proof against practically any database with an ODBC driver. VB certainly didn't have that, Delphi wasn't as good with more than a single table and Powerbuilder was just Powerbuilder. ;-)
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>As for bugs: lets start with the grid. Yes, many of us wrote around the bugs that we all grew to know. Actually there were issues as late as VFP9 to do with cell background colors behind supposedly transparent controls. But FP2.6 didn't have a grid at all. We used to have to position browse windows over forms and jump through hoops to make them stay there and behave sensibly as users navigated around. It's not as grids suddenly took a backward step with VFP.
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>What about long field names: whether with local or C/S databases, FP2.x required truncation of long field names and manual management of the result. Anybody who ever used FP2.x against Oracle databases with the usual long fieldnames will remember the fun. ;-) But in VFP fields retained their names and screeds of code could be replaced with a single command. I get the feeling that not many here were doing much C/S in 1995 because the improvement was monumental over what else was out there.
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>Views did have bugs, some of which could not be worked around. There was a nasty memory leak that utilized all resources as you kept requerying. That was bad. Our workaround was to split processing into 750-transaction segments and then spawn a new instance whenever that limit was reached. FWIW at the same time Word 2 had a nasty memory leak that also used all your resources if you opened and closed lots of documents. Who holds that against Word now? We prevented it the same way.
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>Performance with tabs: an issue, but FP2.6 didn't have tabs (though some of us had rolled our own) and the arrival of tabsets did lead to busy forms, often with hundreds of controls and grids. I think it may have been Anders Altberg whose solution I first saw. It would be called "lazy loading" today, iow not loading pages until we actually need them, to reduce instantiation baggage. That made a big difference. FWIW, lazy loading is one of the features needed for POCO in 2010.
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>As for the rest: I must say I'm surprised. Having done well enough on the beta to be in the fortunate minority awarded a shiny new VFP box that arrived long before the official release date, I released my first 32-bit app in August 1995 the moment that Win95 was first released, which happened first in the world at midnight in New Zealand in case anybody is wondering. ;-) Apart from the memory leak and a couple of other annoying glitches, it all worked and the customer was more than satisfied to receive a 32-bit app with C/S capability. Of course I agree that VFP5 was better and of course I understand why somebody might have been willing to wait a year or two for it, just as they might have been willing to wait a year or eight for POCO in NET. ;-)

I didn't think there was much trouble with data handling in Delphi. Very similar to what VB apps do.

I worked for a company that at one time was the biggest FoxPro shop in the Chicago area. Not long before I joined they had made the switch to Delphi for all custom development work, other than C apps written by the factory automation group (low level machine control). Even our legacy xBASE app was written in Clipper, not FoxPro.