>Al and Jeff...
>
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Hi John,

I in no way wanted to argue the merits of the VFP object model vs. that of VB. As I said, I don't know VB at all, so there's no way I could do that. I was simply pointing out that there *are* commercial frameworks for VFP, written by people I respect, which give excellent functionality for developing business apps.

The value of this, for me, is that a framework essentially transforms VFP into an even higher-level language than it already is. I can do more with less effort - one of the classic definitions of progress. As Markus Egger says in his sig, "Life is too short to code in C++".

OTOH, if there were any add-on products that worked in a similar way for VB, I'd be very interested. I've heard estimates that the VB community is roughly 10x the size of the VFP community; all other things being equal, should there not be 50 or 60 productivity-enhancing add-ons available for it?

The reason I'm asking is that I'm considering starting up a partnership with 2 other experienced developers. All started in the Fox world. I've stayed with it; another is totally sold on VB and doesn't want to go back to Fox; the third is fence-sitting. I'm really pretty mercenary about this; my knowledge is Fox, but if something demonstrably better comes along, or even as good but in a more widely used platform, I'm going to look pretty hard at it.

I was not trying to be combative here or to argue that VFP is better than VB, because I simply don't know that. I would just like to know if you could point out any products for VB that offer similar functionality to the VFP frameworks, that I might evaluate for my proposed partnership. If the partners decide to focus on VB I could go along, but I'd hate to have to learn a new language AND give up the productivity I'm used to. It would also benefit the other guys, who aren't currently using any sort of VB framework or add-on productivity enhancement tool.