I see the problem you are facing. One thing that we all must do is to differentiate our personal needs with the needs of a company to follow the prevailing trends in development. VFP is best deployed as a single/two-tier application development tool. Forget the OO aspects of VFP and concentrate on the DML language. The integrated data engine and DML are VFP's real strengths. Yes, OO is great, but if OO was perceived as all that important in the general development environment, VB would have been dumped years ago. In fact, you can employ many OO concepts in VB. Inheritance just happens to be one of those things that you cannot employ fully. Clearly, the masses out there don't care. So, banging the OO drum for VFP falls on many deaf ears, and the rest of the folks out there say "So what...".

All of that said, I use VFP, love VFP, and think for many tasks, VFP is about the best tool out there. MS cannot afford to go out there and say 'Hey, start using VFP'. No way MS is going to mess with the VB franchise.

In many ways VB is better positioned for multi-tier developer. Consider VBScript and VBA, and we find that VB is firmly entrenched. Many folks just stop at the VB environment itself. I look at all 3 when defining what VB is.

Finally, I don't agree that MS is not standing behind VFP. Yes, they don't push VFP over VB, but that is not the same as totally abandoning the product. If they did, we would not see VFP 6 or VFP 7, which has been promised. VFP and VB can work well together. If I were you, I would look at this as an opportunity to get up to speed on VB. That can never hurt...








>Hi John,
>I just wanted to toss in some experiences I have just run into. I'm switching divisions in my company. The new group I'm going to has people with FoxPro/VFP experience, but we are not being allowed to use the tool. We can write our own utilities for personal use, but anything going to an end user has to be written in Access and VB. Demos have been put together showing that VFP outperforms Access for the types of applications that they are writing, but these have been ignored. The mindset of management is that VB is the way to go because MS does not stand by the VFP product. The lack of any real advertising in comparison fuels this argument. Finally, because VB is promoted so heavily, we can no longer find any experienced VFP programmers for full time work, or graduates who are willing to work with the language. The lack of bodies willing to work with VFP is another driving force to eliminate it as a viable tool in my workplace.
>
>Do you see this trend out in your area? I'm in CT.
>
>Scott Fitzgerald