Hi Cecil,

VFP is RAD oriented for programers.
MS Access is RAD oriented for BFU (normal users).
VFP is enemy of c# and MS SQL ;-)

MartinaJ

>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>Cecil