Hi Perry,

>First, the good news, or at least the point I agree with. The FP to VFP conversion. I remember being at a traveling roadshow for VFP3. Someone at the show, who happened to be responsible for one of the local user groups, was totally hung up on the fact that there was no longer a SPR type file that he could go into and look at the code behind the form. The "I want total control" syndrom. I don't need no stinkin Report writer (@ say, gets baby), Form Generator, Menu Generator, etc. Pretty much a lame excuse for not having to learn new technology IMO.

I barely escaped that morass, to be honest. I had absolutely no use for the power tools up until a project in FPW 2.6 changed my mind and I realized that a lot of what Iw as learning could be applied to FPD. Sounds silly, but up to that point I was more in the "everything in a PRG/SPR/MPR" mentality. I have a gut feeling that a lot of the old Fox developers hit that wall (no good power tool experience) with VFP 3 and ditched Fox.

>I also find the VFP community to be skewed older than something like VB. So the community is naturally going to be more resistant to change. The last place I worked at, most of the programs were written by one of the owners. An older guy with a scientific background. Never trained at all in the programming discipline. His programs were all written for himself. He had no idea how to structure an application so someone else could actually understand what he was trying to do. My guess is that there's a lot of these type of folk still out there doing some form of FP/VFP work

Agreed.

>Next point is your comment about certification. First, I don't think software certification is worth that much in the marketplace. Second, the corporate environment would be the one place that certification would have any value. And as I've stated before, at least here in Los Angeles, corporate VFP development is nil. Totally dried up. VFP has been in maintenance mode for at least the last 2 years here. Its even gotten lower over the last year. At this time last year I could expect to find 50-70 VFP jobs on Dice.com for the LA area. Now its 30-40. And a portion of those are "VFP knowledge a plus" type jobs, they still have a VFP app in maintenance mode.

Nobody ever lost work for being certified. It's a notch in the professionalism belt. As to VFP work drying up, Perry, I would have agreed with you up to about a year ago and now I'm seeing an upswing. A *major* upswing. Whether that's real or just local or what, I don't know.

Get the foot in the door, show what you can do and the tool be damned. That's my mantra :-D