>My company is looking at the future for database development. We are debating between VFP and Visual Basic. Any thoughts Pro / Con would be appreciated.
>
>Thank You.

Rich;

We've done FoxPro work for many years. Lately I've been spending a lot of time learning VB and ASP. I think you need to consider a few things.

What do your existing developers know? If you have a good team of FoxPro programmers who don't know much VB, then changing to VB will be a slow process. If you have a bunch of VB programmers, moving them to VFP will be excruciating.

What types of applications are you writing? VFP is very good at small workgroup applications where you can use it's native data engine. It can also handle large apps with SQL back ends very well with remote views. With VB, you will have to use ADO (or DAO) for data access. This isn't necessarily bad. At that point you can use SQL Server, an Access database, or even VFP tables on the back end.

What are your existing applications written in, and what kind of maintainace will you be doing on them? If you have a lot of existing FoxPro applications that you want to keep and upgrade, then you should consider staying with FoxPro. Then you will have the in house skills to maintain your existing applications.

What's the future of your development going to be like? As much as I like VFP, I don't know that I'll be pursuing a lot of VFP work in the future. I'm not saying VFP is dead, it isn't. However, VB is obviously a more strategic product from Microsoft's point of view than VFP. How well VFP will take advantage of the .NET architecture is anybody's guess right now. At TechEd in Orlando, I saw a lot of VB, SQL Server, ASP etc., but there wasn't a single session on VFP. I'm not stupid, I can see where Microsoft is pushing developers, and I don't feel like pushing back against the monster that is Microsoft.

That about sums it up. Is one "better" than the other? The answer is simply...it depends :-)

Hope this helps more than it confuses...


Jim Munn, MCP
Visual Data Solutions.