I made a presentation to a very large, multi-billion dollar company last week. The proposal was to upgrade a divisional accounting system. The presentation took several months to prepare. We spent weeks analyzing their business model.

At the end of our two and one-half hour board/director level overview the CIO asked about the toolset we would use to produce this new n-tier system. I proudly announced MS SQL Server 7, (a few nods of approval and some questions on why not Oracle) MTS, (glazed eyes and question marks), COM/DCOM, (my presentation covered this so they understood) and VFP. The conversation soon turned into a free for all. The VP of Finance stood up and said that if VFP were used in any way he could not support the decision and would not allocate any monies to the project.

Trying to save any possible chance at getting this 2 million dollar contract, I asked, “Why are you so adamantly apposed to VFP? It’s a great tool and stands head and shoulders above any other in its class.”
His retort was “Last year we tried to Y2K remediate one of our mission critical applications, written in VFP. The programmer left the company and we spent several months trying to recuite a qualified developer and could not. We had to resort to using outside services, this is not a good business decision.”

Unfortunately this conversion is becoming more common. In many ways the VP is right, when was the last time you tried to hire a competent VFPer.

I like Microsoft, (a love/hate relationship) with their help and FP/VFP, I have been able to make a very good living. At times I feel like a football star, paid way more that they are worth, after all it’s only a game.

In the past I’ve been able to land contracts with large multi-national companies (Big Blue, P&G, Transamerica, etc) but VFP isn’t cutting it any more. MS isn’t helping either. When was the last time you saw a VFP Add outside of Fox Advisor or a MS presentation focused on a VFP solution? They only preach to the choir.

The local collages are turning out CS majors with VB knowledge not VFP. I teach professional level classes at a University, and when we try to put on a VFP class no one shows up. The VB classes are always booked with a waiting list. Is VB a better tool? The students don’t know that’s why they are students, but they do know the market and what’s waiting for them when they get into the “real” world.

“Real programmers program in VB.” I guess we don’t have any real programmers and probably never will. There are several development tools we consider much better and will stick with them.

As for my contract, I changed the backend to Oracle, the front-end to Powerbuilder and agreed to support their mission critical applications at no charge. We won.

PS Microsoft isn’t it about time that your products import from and export to FoxPro tables not dBase?