I disagreed with everyone I met on the break from being packaged in VS back when. I thought it was the demise of VFP. I thought (and still think so) that had VFP stayed in VS and the syntax brought into .net, even if it meant losing the local databases (and any compatibility with existing vfp apps) that the majority of vfp developers would have migrated to .net - some would have refused and gone elsewhere, but it would have given many VFP developers a level of comfort in the switch (like it did for the vb developers after much screaming about it). Even with the existing apps not being compatible - it would have moved vfp into the future and been an easier migration path for developers. Many may have still switched to C# (I was one of those after testing the waters with vb.net first) and some would still have left for open-source, but it would have been an easier migration for some to introduce them to the framework. As it is now, my days are filled with jumping between C# and VFP depending on the project I am working on...I would still be jumping around, but it would have helped to give customers a level of comfort knowing their product was in a MSFT tool with a future.


>I agree with those other competitors you mentioned, and I was just saying the one competitor that FoxPro lost it's only battle to was Microsoft.
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>VFP competed with SQL Server as a database, and in the free runtime versus user/processor license business model. But I understand your point that it is somewhat apples vs oranges. And, over half of VFP apps in the last 7 years or so use SQL Server rather than DBFs for the app data storage.
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>>But it's half funny and half sad that the biggest competitor to FoxPro in history was not Borland/Aston-Tate with dBASE, or Borland with Delphi, etc., it was actually Microsoft - with Access, VB, VS/.NET, and SQL Server.
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>>I have a slightly different perspective. First, Fox had big competition in the early years - competition from Ashton-Tate, QuickSilver, and Clipper. It's just that Fox won the battles by producing a better product (while dBase IV and Clipper 5.0 were horrible failures, and QuickSilver just never evolved).
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>>I never saw Fox as competition to SQL Server. SQL Server is a database platform. I understand the perspective of the history of MS and Fox and your blog posts, but I think some of the products you mentioned are more of apples-oranges comparisons.