>Hello all,
>
>I'm just curious to see what's exactly the advantage of using VB over VFP or just using VB at all. Almost all my VFP colleagues and friends do not like it at all after trying it for a while and I haven't just had any time, interest, or opportunity to really have to use it.
>

In short, almost everything that VFP is way too cumbersome to use for - it does create ActiveX controls, integrates ActiveX/ADO and related technologies well, has good ties to the Win32API, flexible, useful internal objects not available to VFP easily like a Regular Expression parser. It's not what I'd use for data-centric apps by choice, and I wouldn't do tons of low-level development with it, but it's great for QUAD, lightweight things.

It's also the basis for VBA, the programming/integration platform for MS Office, is one of the scripting options for ASP, is one of the two underlying scripting languages that the replacement for batch files called the Windows Script Host uses, can be added as a scripting tool to almost any language supporting ActiveX, is conceptuallty east for an end-user to get a handle on and get some quick ROI and visible results from with less learning curve.

And MS likes it, which means that learning it now will pay off in the future if we stay in the Wintel marketplace.

I'd much rather do something lightweight and quick for Windows using VBScript than graft on perl, especially if I want to be sure that what I do works on whatever the next platform from MS will be.

And I get endless pleasure from watching code-blinded people who're too stuck on their product to admit that it ain't the right tool for everything get really annoyed by the ease of a QUAD tool when a QUAD tool is the right thing to use - and I'm coming at this with a background at the systems programming level, who knew PL/C and assembler long before I played with Fox...

I wouldn't try writing a world-killer data-centric app based around VB by choice, but then, if I had to have the app run on CE (as opposed to just having the front-end hosted on a CE box), VFP is a piece of crispy toast, since "Homey don't play on CE" - but variants of VB and VC++ do, and it's a piece of cake to do QUAD VB...

Not all jobs are nails, and hammers work poorly on sheet glass...