>A short while ago I wrote about our wish to migrate a successful vfp app to a language with a more abundant developer supply long term.
>
>As a cautious first step, we think it would be good to start with a smaller new and related app in order to gain experience. So this thread is about that new app. A big goal is to choose tools that give developer productivity and avoid the need to write repetitive code.
>
>So far we are leaning in the following ways but are open to suggestions:
>1) Web based
>2) .NET
>3) Undecided between SQL Server and MySql for reasons of cost to customer vs advantages to developer (what are the advantages to developer?)
>4) Use MVC framework
>4) Use tools that automate database evolution at user site
>5) Use tools that simplify business rule evolution with valid date range for the rules
>6) We would *really* like it if the tools we chose allow us to store some BusinessObject attributes in Object-Attribute-Value form rather than exclusively as columns in a table
>
>All comments are welcome.
>
>Alex

I'll stick my neck out and suggest nodejs as a possible alternative. You'll only have one language to cope with (javascript) which allows using eval in a similar way to VFP). Also means you can use the same code for validation/calculation on either the server or the client.

If you do stick with .NET then, as far as possible, use static html pages and just use WebApi to supply data

Craig mentioned mongodb as a possible DB alternative and that may be worth exploring if you can get away from the relational db model.
On the client side consider angular + bootstrap.