>Hi,
>I've been recommended that this is a good place to find experts in Visual Foxpro. My boss has given me the task of evaluating Visual Foxpro for possible new jobs. He's had one or two people say how good it is &, being on the nervous side for using new stuff, he wants me to find out what is bad about it. So I thought I'd try asking the real users of the product. I assume the majority of people here will be able to tell me all sorts of good things, but just like that awful interview question "And now tell me about your worst qualities", I'd like to pose the same question about Visual Foxpro. What is going to make our lives difficult if we chose Visual Foxpro ?

1. DBF and/or CDX corruption occurs when you are writing to a table and the power goes out. The CDX can be rebuilt easily enough if you saved all your index definitions in a script file (highly recommended) but DBF corruption is a sentence in hell (time to get the backups).

2. No security built in to DBF files - anyone can open it using ODBC driver w/ other app (Word, Excel, Access) or VFP for that matter.

3. Anemic MS marketing resulting in low perception of VFP usage and MS support.

3. View designer cannot handle 3+ table joins - need to code more complex views by hand using CREATE VIEW (SQL). Also, view designer is not reverse engineerable like in MS Access.

4. 2 GB file size limit forcing large tables to be partitioned vertically.

5. Non object-oriented menu and report designers - virtually unchanged since Foxpro 2.5 in 1993 (although I haven't checked out VFP 7 menu/report des.)

6. Cannot create ActiveX DLLs using VFP.

That's the majority of VFP weaknesses that I know of. Hope this helps.

-JT