Hi Malcolm,

it's important that you find out what are the business reason behind the switch to VFP. If there are such reasons, you can bring up as many technical reasons as you want, they won't help you. And just as important is, who made the decision? Was it a manager with little knowledge about software development, or was it the lead of your department with more knowledge?

Can you find a business reason to keep development in VFP? Such reasons can be, for example:

- Do you have strong knowledge about certain things specific to your business, IOW, you can't be easily replaced by someone else without some training? In that case, letting you implement this knowledge in VFP is less expensive, because you don't have to learn a new tool.

- Can VFP used to implement the same solution (especially middle-tier) in a less-expensive way? For example, can you use class hierarchies that can't be simulated easily in VFP to implement a design faster? Can you test and debug components in VFP easiler, because you can test each class separately?

- Is there a lot of code in VFP that must be translated to VB if your team switches to VFP, and can you use this code in a mixed environment with only minor changes?

- Is there any backup developer for you? A company really doesn't like to depend on you personally, and VFP developers are short at the moment.

- Is there any Y2K related stuff going on? And can you implement that faster in VFP, or might there even be the chance that your team missed the deadline when it rewrites a lot of code in VB?

If it's a technical decision, what were the reasons brought up? Can you convince them that:

- It's easier to get support VFP, because there's a huge number of people helping you out?

- VFP can access ADO and SQL Server just as easy as VFP can?

- VB is really a good UI tool, but lacks some features for middle-tier components?

- Microsoft official placement for VFP is the middle-tier part, because that's where VFP really shines without being a competition for VB and SQl-Server?

- The object model that you implement even complex scenarios with a minimum of effort?

The really important part is to figure out what were the reasons to switch, otherwise you can't argument.


Christof