>I was having a discussion with our CIO who doesn't know anything about Visual FoxPro (9) and has only experience with Classic ASP and VB and he thinks they were great.
>
>He also said that once we get a better programming language (C#) that because it is more efficient all our problems (being behind schedule, etc.) will go away. He also speculated that there were some great 3rd party tools that would make the data access better in C#. Of course, my experience with C# is a couple of web apps that I wrote, using MereMortals .NET and watching videos on LearnDevNow.
>
>I just do not believe that our problems are because of FoxPro.
>
>Most of the coding we do is grab data from flat files provided by the State and push the data into FoxPro tables or SQL Server tables and beat the data up and create PDF reports and spreadsheets. So, we really need and use commands like APPEND FROM SDF or Delim, SCAN FOR, Update, Insert, Replace data in current row, SQL Select etc.
>
>Does anyone know of some magical C# tools that will take the place of those useful FoxPro one-line commands? And I'm not talking about BOs here. No, I doubt it. I think for APPEND FROM (with a FOR) SDF that you would have to write a custom parser for each input in .NET.
>
>Bottom line is that I believe that our efficiency and productivity will go down and we will need more programmers not less.
>
>Yes, I know FoxPro is dead and I'm dying to program in C# only, but what is the truth?

AFAICS the one area above where VFP is a clear winner is in use of the 'APPEND FROM' command to import into VFP tables and, of course, the ability to do a lot of the other stuff on an ad hoc basis from the command prompt. So, to a large extent, you're right - if you spend a lot of time importing data on a one-off basis and in varying formats then you are not going to be particularly productive if you have to write a c# program for each case.

I've been working almost exclusively in .NET for years now but, given the scenario you describe, I'd probably still fall back to VFP to get the data into a queryable form.