First off Ken I'd like to say that I'm impressed with what you, Mike and Garret
have been doing here. It's very encouraging for the future.

As to your message, I started with Visual FoxPro 3. There were a lot of
bugs in it and the documentation was often unclear and wrong. I sent Mike an e-mail pointing out what I believe to be one such error.

Also, it is hard to learn and there really haven't been a lot of good resources available to people.

A lot of people wrote it off for that reason and that perception has to a great extent stuck. We all know the product has greatly improved since then.
The challenge is to get people to look again

I think Whil with Henzenwerke has helped in that direction.

The on-line resources are also I great step in the right direction.

But a big part of the problem for me has been the perceived lack of legitimacy that FoxPro has had. That's especially hard for someone who is new to development to get over.

Perception is a huge issue and the buying decision is often made by non-technical people who do the safe thing by following the crowd. For example, I know of a former FoxPro developer that started a database project in Access because management was comfortable with that. The app handles several million records. They then migrated the back end to SQL server which is fine, but they're having a heck of a time continuing to use Access as a front end.


I have a friend that works at a major company here in town that had a major consulting firm come in to do Java development. A big problem that they have is that they have a lot of legacy systems with AS400 databases and over time since it hasn't been documented no one knows what's out there. My friend used VFP and ODBC to get at the data. The consultants were very impressed. "Hey, what's that?", they said. When he told them it was FoxPro they said they'd never heard of it. The irony is that the company used to have Fox 2.6 on very desktop. Now Microsoft developers that are there are saying Fox is going away.

I used to work for a marketing consulting firm and as the owner used to say,
"Perception is everything."