>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.
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>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.
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>I just do not believe that our problems are because of FoxPro.
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>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.
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>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.
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>Bottom line is that I believe that our efficiency and productivity will go down and we will need more programmers not less.
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>Yes, I know FoxPro is dead and I'm dying to program in C# only, but what is the truth?

When it comes to the type of data conversion work you describe. Nothing even comes close to competing with VFP. The other tools that I've seen are not even in the ballpark. When it comes to massaging data I've always been able to far more in far less time with the dBase than with any other language.

If VFP is providing you what you need for reporting, then I would stick with it.

I do have to admit however, that I am doing magical stuff using the XPS report writer and WPF. HTML output might also be a tad easier in C#. But all of that is probably over kill for what you need. Others have also mentioned some good options for you here.

I wouldn't consider VFP a viable language for most things anymore. But when it comes to the type of work I do at the command prompt and with small utility programs... there is no replacement for VFP. (Which is kind of sad)