Jon ---

There is a white-paper at MS that basically says that if your butt is on the line, use VFP....it's a VFP vs. Access paper but I'll be doggoned if I can remember the URL (sorry)

VFP beats the heck out of Access on a number of fronts. First off, you have little control over multi-user issues in Access (like locking, buffering, FIFO, LIFO, what-not). Secondly, Access is a pig (VERY fat client). Third, you can design your VFP application to use views for data access and then swap out the source of those views to SQL Server, Oracle, et al in the future to promote scalability.


>I am responsible for the development done by 5 programmers who are presently using MS Access. We sell general purpose commercial accounting software that is targeted at the mid-range business (a business having $500,000 to $5,000,000 sales per year).
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>We want to move from Access for a variety of reasons, one of which is the slow response time we are experiencing in a network environment. We moved to the Windows platform three years ago, but have been selling accounting software since 1981. We previously used various versions of Basic and Btrieve in the DOS environment.
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>I have been looking very seriously at FoxPro as a replacement development environment. It seems to fit in nicely with what we want to do. Our customers and our resellers are not yet ready for the client-server environment so we are looking at FoxPro as being a step up in the file-server environment.
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>However, I have been spending a lot of time browsing across the internet at sites like this one and am having second thoughts because of the ongoing discussions about the future of FoxPro. I must weigh the risks of using a development platform against the benefits since the future of our company depends on selling accounting software.
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>Maybe I should go with VB and Pervasive.SQL or try once again to be happy with Access2000 and MSDE. Please help me make up my mind by sharing some of your good advice.