Kevin,

Well stated. We do not live in an "either or" kind of world, development-wise. For those who wish to walk away from tons of work in order to be 'ideologically (from a techincal pov) pure' with respect to using exactly the correct part for each process I say a huge, "Thank you!"

For me, it all boils down to taking care of the client - even those who may not have the resources to spend for an extra SQL server right now. For these folks I'll 'make do' and give them a well designed app that can more easily migrate to a more robust backend when they (the client) are able.

Sometimes customers cannot wait and from my pov it is more important to help them meet their needs than to avoid somehow 'sullying' my reputation because I may have dared to build a less-then-perfect application. <g>

"You use what for a back end?" *sniff*

<g>

I also agree that we should learn the other stuff as well. That's only smart.

Best,

DD


>Jim and others,
>
>>This is the third company I've worked at where VFP is being replaced with VB.>
>
>Although I have seen my share of VFP shops moving to VB there are still an incredible number of development shops sticking with and *moving to* VFP (usually from FP2.X, but also from other development tools). I have many conversations with developers who call our company to purchase Mere Mortals, so I have a good sense for what's going on in the VFP world.
>
>Based on the type of mentoring and training that I do, most of these companies I work with are not simply using VFP for 1 or 2-tier applications. I have far more work than I can handle helping companies move to a true n-tier distributed architecture, scaling their applications to the Internet. I've been able to place a good number of VFP developers with companies who need this sort of expertise, as well as providing many independent consultants with contract work.
>
>The fact that there is only a small percentage of developers who understand these concepts is not unique to the VFP community. I have the opportunity to work with many non-VFP developers and I can tell you the situation is the same across the board.
>
>It's a *great* time to be an advanced Visual FoxPro developer who understands and can implement the concepts of n-Tier architecture. The scarcity of these skills actually turns out to be a great opportunity for those who have mastered n-tier architecture.
>
>That said, I still think it's a great idea to become familiar with other development tools. I personally use VB (including VBScript, VBA), JavaScript and C++. I also recommend getting intimate with client-server databases such as SQL Server or Oracle.
>
>Regards,