I have MS Access 2010 and thought I might take a look at it to see if much has happened since its previous versions. I lost a job a while back because I said that MS Access is nothing more than an over-glorified toy. I would already have been contracting to the federal government and earning a decent income had I not had this prejudice. So, in retrospect, I am revisiting MS Access to see if there is anything worthwhile in it, as compared to Visual FoxPro. One of the members of our local DOT NET user group still makes a decent living with MS Access which caught me off guard. It surprised me, frankly.

In the FoxPro heydays when FoxPro was drawing up to 2,000 or more people to its conferences, we laughed to scorn anyone who thought of MS Access as a serious development tool; although I do not know all of its downsides, I know that there are, or were, a few.

So, here I am years later, when FoxPro is no longer being supported and Microsoft continues to expand MS Access; it is shocking to me, to say the least that MS Access gets this kind of attention, when a better tool by far, Visual FoxPro, has been shelved.

Although Visual FoxPro is not fully supported by Microsoft, nor will Microsoft make a version 10, I still like it very much and it does a great job. It does a fantastic job. Which is why I am astounded that Microsoft abandoned Visual FoxPro and have expanded on MS Access.

It is obviously true that Bill Gates loved and expanded his own stuff. If he didn't have a personal involvement in it, then it didn't get the attention it needed to endure to the end. Visual Basic and C# are here because they depend on SQL Server. You get lots of licensing fees from those SQL Server seats, but what do you get from a VFP database that is free to the users? It was a financial decision, I am sure, but a tragic one for all of us who "dearly loved" Visual FoxPro.

I have been developing software with FoxPro since its 1.02 version. I continue to learn Visual FoxPro as I go along with a contract here and there, fewer as time goes by. Some of you were there at its inauguration as FoxBase. I don't know how many developers were left high and dry over Microsoft's decision to improve on and support .NET and abandon Visual FoxPro, but I know it wasn't only a few.

Oddly, there are, reportedly, still some few Foxers earning very decent incomes from Visual FoxPro development. I watched a video from the last Southwest Fox Conference in Mesa or Tempe, Arizona, wherein a person stated that there were some in that room earning between 200k and 400k developing FoxPro apps. That is surely the case. I don't think it is as prevalent on the west coast as it is on the east coast and areas such as Washington, D.C., Chicago, Detroit, etc.

Okay, this is a true rambling moment. I am sure that I am not the only FoxPro developer who has had some of the above thoughts.

Cecil