After reading John V. Peterson's advice here about the value of expanding my toolset (so I would no longer be a one-language developer) I was pleased to have the opportunity to take a five-day VB6 class. The instructor was Jim Duffy (www.takenote.com) and in this particular class everyone had a VFP background, so Jim used our common basis in VFP to help us grasp new concepts in light of what we already knew.

I had some of the same "Aha!" experiences that I had in high school foreign language classes, where learning about prepositions or infinitives in my foreign language meant I finally grasped what they were in English. For me, many of these had to do with the Windows API.

I saw some things to like in VB, and will be venturing into some VBA programming in some Excel workbooks we distribute to collect data. At the same time, I felt awkward with certian things (or missing things) in VB.

Since VB must use an external data store, there was also a lot of discussion of MSDE and MS SQL Server. I have a better understanding of the choices for my data now also. Again, I saw some things to like in MSDE and SQL Server.

I stumbled into FoxPro as a development tool, and the shop where I am now may also have "stumbled" into using FoxPro without knowing exactly it was the best choice for their needs. Now that I have a wider range of tools I can choose the best tool and data store for each of our needs, and know what I gain and what I lose in that choice. I can also build multi-tool solutions, such as building an ActiveX control in VB to use within a VFP solution.

Finally, I have another tool on my resume, making myself a better choice to meet anyone's needs for a software solution developer, including the needs of my current job.