Hi Evelyn,

Imo, vb's popularity is due to two very simple reasons:
1. It's bill gate's spoiled child.
2. It's extremely easy to learn and achieve some proficiency (this has nothing to do with good or bad coding).

Long ago, everybody laughed when bgates said he'd bring basic to windows like he did many years ago for older pc's. Regardless of this being something born WITHIN the walls of MS, being it his idea, I guess he put extra emphasis in its development and everybody at MS worked hard at making it succeed, both as a programming language and from a marketing standpoint.

My personal guess is that Fox was taken over by MS so that possible competition for Access would be killed fast, but luckily something within this line of reasoning changed and here we are.

Proficiency: I have been programming databases before dbase II came out, yet, when I moved into vfp it has taken me 6 months to achieve some proficiency in spite of reading a LOT and being on the UT religiously. VFP is very unforgiving.

A friend of mine who never did any serious programming besides college assignments (which we usually did in assembler) got bitten by the programming bug a few months ago and took on VB. I would say that he achieved proficiency in no more than a month or at least he feels quite confident by now about his programming abilities. Yet he did mention to me that he tends to get lost in the jungle of active-x controls that he's downloaded due to the promise that they can enable you to do practically anything.

As far as active-x controls and vfp goes, what I've heard is that vb is far more forgiving in this area than vfp, but given that automation is language-independent, I don't think that one is more reliable than the other.

Alex


>Hi, everyone!
>
>I am not sure exactly where this thread fits better than here so please pardon me if it's in the wrong place.
>
>I wish to get everyone's opinion here why VB seems to be a more popular programming
>language than VFP and get a rough survey of how many still prefer VFP over VB and in what
>particular type of application, if any? I am a serious fan of VFP but know a little of VB so that I cannot
>comment much. Although VFP may have limitations, too, depending on what one is trying to do,
>I believe that VFP can still serve my company's needs very well. I particularly want to know if there's
>any reason to feel insecure about its existence in the near future. (Need to tell my boss about this.)
>
>Also, can anyone please comment on the lines said below? I find a few things here that are not quite
>right here but I want to hear what others have to say:
>"However, I realized that Visual Basic runs more stable and more reliable that Visual FoxPro 6.0
>when using ADO(ActiveX Data Objects) controls to automate Office97 and Microsoft Outlook.
>This is one other reason that explain the fact that Visual Basic is more widely used than
>Visual FoxPro in the Information Technology(IT) industry."
>
>TIA
>
>E. Sia