Mark:

In my experience so far, the real-life relevance of any bullet points advocating VFP over VB, or VB over C#, etc., would really depend on the features of the application(s). There are documents out there, which others have already pointed out to you. But these tend to be very general guidelines - I am not sure if any overall architectual decisions have been made yet, but if so, these also may affect your decision.

For instance, are these data intensive applications, and if so, will all of their databases reside on the same server? If so, this might be an argument in favor of VFP middle level objects, which could take some of the data-crunching load off of the data server.

Will you be breaking the various pieces of the application into many distinct objects? If so, instantiation speed may be an issue. VB object instantiation is a little quicker in my experience for objects with comparable amounts of code. But, the differences are minimal, so I am not sure that this will matter.

Will your objects be passing different types of return values to one another, or will you just be using XML? If you might be passing various integers, dates, and objects, my gut tells me that VB's hard-typing/early-binding will provide better performance.

Will you be using MTS? Both languages work fine in MTS, but VB has a little more built in support (specific properties, etc. for using MTS).

Will your components be generating HTML or performing other string manipulations or concatenations? Visual FoxPro is MUCH quicker than VB in string manipulation.

... and so on.






>My department is now at a crossroads.
>
>All of our really successful systems are written in Foxpro but I am now the only VFP programmer left in our department and am surrounded by VB developers.
>
>We are just about to plan for providing web enabled applications and management look as if they may end up giving all this intresting work to the VB developers. This is in spite of them being sympathetic to VFP because it has been such a successful product for them compared to their experience with VB.
>
>I need some good sales ammunition to fire in support of VFP in a meeting that is to take place in a few days time.
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>I need to demonstrate why VFP is better at working with the web than the opposition so I need ideas for any sales aids folks can come up with.
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>Ideally I need to see a strong argument that has already been written in favour of VFP on the Web and some working examples showing how easily this can be achieved in VFP.
>
>Also I need to know if the crux of the argument I am putting forward is accurate.
>
>I will be arguing that if the department is planning to move towards .Net then it should be delivering applications in VFP 7.00 now to take advantage of those portions of .Net that exist in VFP 7.00 (I know VFP is not going to be in the CLR but I dont think that is an issue)
>
>I am very hazy on this whole area. Am I right in thinking that VFP 7.00 has good support for SOAP built in or is this only possible by using a third party product like WestWind SOAP manager.
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>Where does XML figure in all this, can I use that as a selling point. The only advantage I have is that the VB guys seem to be as ignorant as me in these areas.
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>I think this thread could become an important one for all of us because these are the sort of arguments that VFP developers are going to have to win somehow the world over.
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>All help most gratefully received.