It's not the tool. It's the marketing. VFP was a developer tool. Access is an end user tool. Big difference. Different people running each group. Different target market. Different marketing people. The DevDiv decided to stop supporting COM-based tools. The Office group did not. The decsions were not made above those groups.

People often, mistakenly, think Microsoft is run by a single guy making all the decisions, whether it be BillG or SteveB. It doesn't work that way. Microsoft is not like a shark, devouring everything in it's path, doing what's best for the greater company. It's more like piranhas. Each group out for itself. Why do you think we get so many, seemingly conflicting technologies? (ADO.NET datasets vs. LINQ to SQL vs. Entity Framework) Why do you think we get so many "failed" products (Smart watches, Bob, InterDev, ActiveDosc) Each group is out to devour the competition and sometimes each other. Each group is trying to push its own agenda and enlarge their own kingdom.

But it seems that Access is being retargeted as a SharePoint tool, rather than for standalone database apps. And in talking to Access MVPs about how VBA is doing in a .NET world, they've told me that Access is becoming less VBA and more macro-based.

If you want to learn something that is current and will pay the bills, there is a huge demand for SharePoint developers. Dig into that technology. Learn it inside and out. Write some articles. Speak at user groups and other events. Start making a name for yourself as a SharePoint expert and you'll get the gigs.


>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