Visual FoxPro was an outstanding application for me, and enabled me to support my family from 1995 until I retired in 2009. As a consultant, I was allowed to use whatever tools I wanted. The last company I worked for (NUMMI – Toyota and General Motors - “We made cars and trucks”) was different. Many large corporations were like NUMMI in that they let the Microsoft sales staff dictate company policy.

Microsoft sales staff in the San Francisco Bay Area put out the word that you should not use Visual FoxPro, even when it was a part of Visual Studio. I had three interviews at NUMMI (5700 employees) and two of them required giving demonstrations of actual applications I had delivered to my customers. I choose to show the applications I created for the California State Employment Development Department, and the San Lorenzo Water District. The IT Department at NUMMI asked me many questions about the applications, and I gave them the details they requested.

After I was hired I was told that the Microsoft Sales Staff told NUMMI to never use Visual FoxPro! We should only use Visual Basic! They relented when I requested that I be allowed to use C#. I was not allowed to use VFP, until the day a serious manufacturing problem arose. The Mechanical Engineering Staff came to me with a very serious problem, about specific parts problems that were showing up during manufacturing. This had to be resolved.

Management required an evaluation of the problem and a solution. We had several H1B's from India, who were in charge of all projects. None of them knew to sit on their own hands! What they knew about programming was something that they could not express or exhibit. After meeting with our director, and the other staff members, the chief H1B declared that it was impossible to write the program requested. The Mechanical Engineering Staff was very upset and needed help – fast.

I suggested that I be allowed one week to come up with a solution, but I had to be allowed to use Visual FoxPro! I had written many applications and knew that one week would be sufficient time for the project. You see, I had my own application library which I had been developing and using for seven years. Because of the importance of this project I was allowed to use Visual FoxPro.

The evening after the meeting I went home, loaded my VFP Library on a Flash Drive, and brought it to work the next morning. It took me 1 ½ days to deliver the final product, after showing it to the Engineering Staff, who loved it. There were several reports each 11” by 17” that gave the required information about the various car and truck models, and each of the many parts used. At the start of each shift the Mechanical Engineers would create a print out to see what problem areas they should concentrate on and resolve issues that existed. By the way we used SQL server and I just tapped into the production database to obtain the required data. When I left in 2009 my application had been running for seven years with no failures.

Microsoft never supported VFP. Having been out of the programming business for the last seven years, I wonder how many people are using the product these days? What is being used by others? Technology is a strange god. (Please note lower case "g". :) )

Tom