I think the comparison with VFP is not a good one, it gives a poor impression where one is not warranted. VFP is dead in respect of it's future. WinDev is a very much alive and growing product both in respect to the technology and to the user base.

I have said this here before; if you are looking for work in the corporate world, or service the corporate world, then you must go mainstream which means .Net or another corporate-accepted platform such as PHP, Java, HTML, maybe JavaScript. You are limited to these fairly few options. These may not be the best tools but they are, for better or worse, the accepted standard in the corporate world and will help you get employed in that world or offer your services to that world.

If, on the other hand, you are looking to develop software either for your own company for resale (like us) or are able to develop solutions for clients that are not mainstream corporate followers then you can pick from a much larger pool of possible technologies including WinDev. In this field you are free to choose the language that suits you, your client and the project best. And WinDev is, imo, probably as close to VFP you are going to get in respect of mindset and development style. It is not xBase but has the same feel about it as VFP albeit in a much more modern way with many visual tools to aid development and design and tools such as UML, RAD and many more. Plus it is absolutely comprehensive, including everything I can think of; every single 3rd party technology/library/tool I have ever had to buy is included in it.

If you are a VFP developer looking for a technology for developing custom applications or servicing a clientele that don't care what technology you use then this is absolutely a product you should seriously investigate. PC Soft produce new releases yearly, is a for-profit and, I'm guessing, a highly profitable company with tens of thousands of developers worldwide. A new release every year with hundreds of new features, 24 hour free support, very extensively documented, tutorials, example code, video demonstrations, etc. A professional platform. It just needs a decent UT forum :)

In respect of "pretty pricey" - I wouldn't bat an eyelid to spend US$100 or US$10,000 on anything that allows me to develop applications that I can sell to clients over and over again, royalty free and does the job better than my competition. Whether that is a course, books, tools or complete development languages and IDEs. These are the tools of my trade. Spending a few hundred dollars should not be a barrier for a serious software developer.

Disclaimer: before anybody starts accusing me of offering "be all and end all, its the greatest thing" opinions; no its not, nothing is. But it should be worthy of serious consideration if you have not already embarked on another platform or are not yet convinced of which direction to go.


>Like I said I don't think it's a bad tool in any way, but it's a niche product, so all the credibility and support/developer issues that you have with VFP also apply here. It's also pretty pricey for licensing especially if you go with cross-platform situations which will inhibit greater adoption I think.
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>Still looks interesting. I may check it out for device dev...
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>+++ Rick ---
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