>>>VFP is dead and has been for quite a while.
>
>LOL. Lots of things are "dead". WP7 has been shedding senior developers and now its lead has jumped ship- to lead the Amazon Android drive. Some observers now predict that Windows8 will be DOA. Some developers regret learning NET over and over now that they see another Renaissance on the horizon. And Juniper is predicting a huge jump to smartphones by 2016. Meanwhile many (most?) customers still use Windows workstations and good old VFP plods along, running on practically any hardware, using hardly any machine resource while munging data at lightspeed. Sheesh, I'm with Mike Beane: I moved away from VFP long before many of the prophets, and we've moved quite a lot of stuff to LAMP, but for fat client front ends to interface with customers' existing fat client systems? New doesn't always mean better. I kept encountering situations where VFP made *far* better sense and some of those reasons are stronger than ever today. Seems to me that VFP has outlived more than a few alternatives that were predicted to drive the last nail into its coffin. ;-)


It does seem to keep going in spite of problems with current operating systems.

OTOH newer environments allow faster product development, native deployment to web/phones/etc, much larger databases, much faster speeds, much better security, much better reliability, use of current hardware and OS capabilities, etc.

It's up the the client and the developer to pick (I haven't found a situation in years where I'd revert to new VFP development).

Personally I don't regret learning any of the .NET platforms I've worked with. Some were a PITA to get used to. Some had serious learning curves. So far, I can develop for Windows, Web, Silverlight, WP7, Compact Framework, Windows services, web services, and probably more but I can't think of them at the minute using .NET. I can pick the platform(s) for the requirement, and I have a world class IDE for development for all.

I like that.