Two observations :

I'm not sure what you mean about missing being able to inherit or copy the methods of a form or a control. I have found that actually much easier in .NET, unless I am misunderstanding your point. I was especially blown away by being able to inject a baseclass into an existing class's inheritance structure. And there is also the matter of partial classes and interfaces - capabilities completely unthought of in VFP. I admit I found the OOP in .NET very "other" at first, as I really had my head in the VFP paradigm ( Visual FoxExpress *really* used VCX ) but once I went with it, I was amazed at how nicely it came together. Now that I am getting into EF I'm seeing the idea of a "class" a whole different way from how I thought of it in Fox.

As to report writers, that had me choking as well. Hated Crystal. Played with Perpetuum's Report Sharp Shooter. And then discovered XtraReports by DevExpress. Amazing. Completely integrated in the VS IDE, no licensing hassles, user designer part of the product etc.

The whole DevExpress toolset is worth the subscription price ten times over, but if all you buy is the Xtrareports ( about $400 out the door, I think ) you get a report writer that gives you everything you ever liked in VFP 9 with XFRX and heck of a lot more.


>Well said, Charles.
>I'm supporting clients on both platforms now and after a couple of years of really struggling with C# I'm finding it increasingly difficult when I have to go back to VFP.
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>One big deal for me is C#''s intellisense and real time compilation - showing errors and warnings as I type.. With VFP I always had a scratchpad handy to note variable or function names, etc so that I'd remember them when I used them later - no more scratchpads - no more "variable x not found."
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>Another big deal is the plethora of tools (mostly free) that have been developed for the C# platform by 3rd party developers. I'm using them constantly.
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>I've also come to appreciate the value of strong typing, which was a big pain when I started. I'm finding that my C# apps are more stable over time than my VFP apps, and that I get almost no support calls. I attribute most of that to strong typing which imposes more rigorous demands on me during the development process.
>I spend more time coding, but a lot less time debugging.
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>From VFP, I miss being able to inherit or copy the methods of a form or a control. That has been a real pain.
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>It was also nice to be able to put together a simple app that popped out some totals or the like in a few minutes - we call them "handy-dandy's." I can't do anything in fewer than 3 or 4 hours in C# by time I set up the references, connections, blah, blah, etc.
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>I also miss that wonderful Report Writer. CR is OK, but for me it's nowhere near as easy to use as VFP's.
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>--I admit the command window has something to be said for it, but I find it an easy trade off for good intellisense, snippets, a real test harness (which can also be used for a lot of the stuff I used to use the command window for), finding stupid typos as I type them rather than at run-time, a serious debugger, a compiler that actually gives me a clue what the problem is, easy source control, WPF, EF, integration with the Windows API and being able to Google for answers. <s> I also do not miss COM at all, especially when deploying.
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>As to prototyping tools ? Did I miss something in VFP? Or do you mean the data window? For User Interface in .NET Sketchflow is kind of cool.
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>Don't get me wrong, I loved working in VFP, but when I have to go back to it now it's like going back to FoxPro Windows 2.6 from VFP 9.0.
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>( Regarding the taking much long in .NET I'd really encourage anyone to check out the many many tools that are out there to cut development time dramatically.)