>>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.

If you've had the most success with VFP why bother with VB?

>>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.

Again, why bother with VB. Isn't your goal to write the most productive apps you can? Sounds like your not putting your customers first.

>>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.

If your building data intensive COM objects or Web Services, doing a lot of vailidating or building web pages on the fly from data, IMO, VFP is a better choice. Its data handling and string manipulation functionality is very extensive. ADO, the data access technology used in VB is only a subset of the VFP cursor engine. VFP is an OOP language which also extends to data. ADO, is only an object based. Same goes for VB.

>>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.

Check out the FAQ's at the VFP web site.

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)

>> You can build XML Web services with VFP 7. Do the other stuff in C# if you like. At least thats what I'm thinking of doing.

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.

>>SOAP is the protocol you can use to communicate with a Web Service.

>>Where does XML figure in all this, can I use that as a selling point.

SOAP enevelopes are packaged as XML documents. XML is a generic way of describing data. Its brings together heterogenous data sources. VFP 7 has built in support for XML.

Regards,
Charlie