>Also, this stuff is not coming from a friend-of-a-friend chain letter. I was told this directly from Andrew Coupe of the Washington DC office of Microsoft Corp. consulting division. He said we should move our VFP code to COM objects in the middle tier, use HTML/ASP for the front-end, and SQL Server for the database. It was a direct question I asked at our PAFox.org user group meeting. I asked him, "What should we do as VFP developers?" Ask him yourself. His email address is acoupe@microsoft.com.


Scott,

Can you see the conflict in the paragraph above. An MS person said you should not use VFP, but you should use it to build middle tier COM objects. I would ask, "What are you saying, should we use it or not?"

The one area where VFP can blow the doors in on most other UI development tools is the full implementation of OOP. With proper class design systems can be pieced together in minimal time. Wiht VB, if you copy a commadn button from one form and paste in another (VB's version of inheritance) the code doesn't go with teh button. You have to cut and paste the code separately.

>The other thing I was told, was from Sprint's IT division. Their Microsoft account manager told them that support for VFP would be dropped in 2-3 years. That's why they're dropping VFP and going with VB. A big company like Sprint won't make this kind of decision without confirmation of hard evidence.

Yeah, I heard that rumor for going on 6 years now. Interestingly, 6 years ago VFP was to be dropped within 1-2 years. Mark Twain said it best, "I believe that the rumors of my death are greatly exagerated."

>I'm not personally defending VB or attacking VFP. I know a lot of developers take this stuff personally and passionately. My allegiance is to Microsoft and $$$. If MSFT says we should develop in Visual Fubar, guess what, I'll be developing in Visual Fubar.

That's also an interesting point. The folks on the VFP team at Microsoft say we should be using VFP, don't they count as Microsoft? Micrososft is investing a serious amount of money in the development of the VFP certification exams (two of them not one)