>A consultant friend I know has been struggling with Access 2.0 as the front end for developing some client-server applications. Now he is considering changing platforms to PowerBuilder, but first he wants to know what I think of PB vs VFP, but I've never used PB.
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>Please reply if you are familiar with PowerBuilder 5.0 and can give any comments on its strengths and weaknesses compared to VFP 5.0.

i had no prior experience with foxpro before using VFP 5.0. have used pb since version 3. it's early versions had lots of gpf problems, but has improved that greatly. Coming from pb to vfp the biggest struggle i've had was dealing with NON-sql data and the many idiosyncroncies of fp tables. VFP seems to be a good solution for small to medium size applications/data/users. I believe the learning curves of VFP and PB are pretty close, that is really subjective though based on prior experience with OO code, relational dbs, etc.

PB is a good product, VFP is a good product. PB is expensive unless he's just looking for connection to the SQL Anywhere DB, where he can get the Desktop edition. Using SQL Anywhere makes moving to SQL Server easy.

Kim