Hi Scott,

The rumors of VFP's death are old and dusty. They have been around for a long time.

I use VB and VC++ on occasion when they are the right tool for the job. Manipulating data is not the right job for VB or VC++. VFP's DML is unmatched for ease of use and power. VFP can build execellent middle tier objects. However, the OO features in VFP make it also unrivaled at developing UI layers rapidly. I wouldn't want to develop a desktop data intensive application using VB as the UI layer because it would take a lot more code to do what VFP can do with data.

As for why VFP has these rumors and VB doesn't;

1) BASIC is and has always been NBill Gates sweet heart (it got him in business in the first place).

2) VB programmers are counted in the millions while VFP programmers are counted in the 100,000's (an order of magnitude difference).

3) VB is considerably easier to learn and become productive with, while VFP takes a commitment of considerable time and effort to get up to speed.

4) Microsoft is a very large company and it is often true that one hand doesn't know what the other is doing.

5) Microsoft field reps get paid based on moving boxes of whatever the currently favorite product is. VB is the favorite child of Microsoft for programming languages.

6) The NIH syndrome, VFP was "not invented here". Access and VB were fully developed by Microsoft, while VFP was aquired. Actually, VFP was fully developed by Microsoft but it isn't seen that way internally.

7) Many misleading and illinformed articles have been written for the main stream journals that give erroneous and incomplete information about what VFP is and what it can do well.

8) The VFP community is coherent and inforkmation travels fast within it. The VFP community is very instrumental in spreading these rumors, while the VB community doesn't exist. VB has no community like Fox does.

9) The chicken little response to the rumors causes them to spread wider and farther than the originator could ever spread them.

My reaction to the infomration in your original post is simply this, analyze the problem to be solved and select the best tool for each part of the solution based on the tool's techincal merits. Be awre of the toher products available (even those not from Microsoft). Contrary to popular opinion, Microsoft is not an unbeatable giant. IBM once thought it was in that position, it is now still very big but it is no where near the reputation it once had.