Hi John,

>Fox is a great tool. VB is a great tool. With numbers come credibilty. Open up any of the rags and look at the case studies on succesfull projects. When was the last time you saw VFP highlighted in InfoWorld, PCWeek, etc? This is the stuff folks read. The Gartner Group is a big source as well. As Cindy accurately pointed out, many managers make decisions based on what the GG reports say or don't say.

Actually, you don't see VB get much press in the mags you mentioned, either. Big, big serious work goes to PeopleSoft, SAP, and others.

>One way or the other, VFP will live. Will it always be a MS product? I don't know. There is already precedent with dBase. Then again, you don't hear alot about dBase, do you? How about clipper/CA-Visual Objects? Those are pretty much dead as well.
>
>The new frontier is the enterprise, the internet, etc... VFP, as perceived by most, is a desktop/lan-based application devlopment tool. Sure, it can play in the web space. It plays in the C/S space. And, it can play in the n-tier space. However, the perception by the folks making the hiring decisions is that it does not.

I agree with you somewhat on the future of development. Want to see the future? Go to http://www.navisite.com . The future is application hosting, offloading technical requirements from the client. Who plays in this area? Sh*t, not VB or VFP for the most part. Think about it: Why would a medium size firm hire VB -or- VFP developers for $50,000 to write a system and pay another $25,000 for the infrastructure to run that system when they could pay a one-time customization fee and run an app via VPN or leased line from an outsourced host.

>We will pay you $100,000 a year to bring your VFP skills to the table to learn VB and to build a full-fledged multi-tier C/S system.

Not me. Seriously. Flip the equation a bit; ask me to be the DBA for SQL Server, Oracle, or Teradata in a huge project and I'm all ears. VB is not a good enterprise tool.