Ed,

>Walter, I'd be more inclined to trust John's and Microsoft's insights here. I don't base this solely on someone else's statistics, or an overwhelming religious attachment to VFP, with a corresponding desire to see it succeed; it's based on what I see in the local marketplace.

Hmmm. when I look here in the netherlands, I see a major increase in this. Two major Accounting packages use VFP for their data handling. One other general solution provider uses VFP, Two big insurance companies (that I know of) uses it. It sure looks that VFP is beginning to get popular here.

>Yes, the number of opportunities locally for using VFP as a development tool has increased numerically. The rate of growth for VB and Java application development opportunities, only a small fraction of these being clearly data-centric, where VFP would be a better choice IMO, far exceeds this.

That's true, but keep in mind that Xbase programs used to be used for things that it wasn't designed to do. Compared to the early days there are far more datacentric programming languages available nowerdays.

Don't forget that the increase of the market is probably due to the fact that a lot of 'ordinary' users like to develop ad-hoc applications in Access. this is where VFP cannot be of any competition.

>While I think the world of VFP, it's not the right tool for all jobs, and it's clearly the wrong tool for many. You can develop web-centric applications with VFP as a basis for your application; but if you intend to deploy on platforms that preclude Wintel architecture, it's not the right (or in most cases, even an available) choice. VB won't work there, either.

I fully agree. A big problem is to define what the market of VFP app is. As long as you can't define the market, how can you mesure the marketshare ? Over the years the IT market has grown extremely complex and wide. Ten years ago there where not that many development tools.

>VFP is precluded when you need continuous, low-level access to the metal and low-level Win32 layers. Christof has done great things with his STRUCT class as far as exposing low-level structures via VFP, but he very clearly points out that it's not fast enough to compete with other products with stronger native low-level support. In many cases, I don't think VB is the right choice, either, but I don't want to bring the issue of VC++ as "the best" general application development language for Win32 platforms in to muddy the waters.

Yep, But if you're a VFP programmer this is a nextbest alternative. Not everyone is comfortable in using both VFP and C++/VB. Expecting people to be, is ignorant.

>VFP is precluded if you want to write ActiveX controls. Period. End of discussion. Just about the only place I develop QUAD with VB by choice.

So vfp is not in the ActiveX development market.

But what are you trying to tell me here? I was merely pointing out that johns arguments don't make sense to me any more that Edwards did. Edward, was trying to say that this marketshare discussion is getting out of hand. There are far too many feelings and unsure facts going arround. For An outsider these threads don't have any valuable information. I can't check any of the told arguments. I can only see what is happening here and I can only guess.

>>John, you're making a fool out of yourself again.....

>Perhaps he's not the only, or worst, offender in this case.

Maybe, maybe not.

Walter,