I just don't see this as an "us versus them" situation. .Net has it's story and VFP has it's story. Neither one 100% overlaps the other. Both kick-ass. Neither is going anywhere anytime soon.


>Hi Perry..
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>Your pretty much on target with me on this. There is no question that VS .net is in the beginnings of its evolutionary path - especially as far as windows development is concerned. If the state of things now is the end of the story -I would be pretty critical. This however, is the beginning. For a beginning, it is not bad.
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>Just looking at the forms designer itself (sans the data) - it is light years ahead of VB. In many respects, it has already surpassed VFP as well. Bring in data, and the story does get a little bleaker. ADO .Net is a great concept. DataAdapters and DataSets are a nice evolutionary change from the Recordset. I have not always felt this way. However, once I saw the method to the madness, I became a believer. The marriage between ADO .Net and the Form Designer is a bit kludgy right now. If there is one area that needs work - it will be this area. Seems to me that if more developers that know and understand data get involved - the story will get better.
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>The bottom line, if you struggle a bit, the data story does work in VS .Net. Will it be as seamless as is the case in VFP? No. Then again, that is counter to the design. The tight coupling of data in the VFP environment as well as how tightly integrated the language/object model is in VFP and VB6 for that matter - is counter to the way VS .Net is designed.
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>I view things as taking a few steps backward now to take a lot of steps forward in the near future. The neatest thing about the environment is that you can deal with objects - independent of a specific language. That is a truly remarkable thing. I had long wondered how MS would create an environment that was language agnostic. The fact is, MS created a framework that can be implemented by a variety of languages.
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>I learn by making a lot of mistakes! I try to leave my pre-conceived notions about how things are in VB 6 or VFP behind when I dealve into VS .Net. Folks that have adopted the philosphy of creating PRG-based classes will have no problems creating class modules in a language like C#. Windows forms are completely different. Where you might expect a property, you wont find it. Rather, it is likely to be an object that another object must reference. A good example is the tooltip example I outlined to MH.
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>As far as continuing to develop in tools like VFP and VB 6, I plan to do so for quite some time to come. At the same time, I plan on spending enough time in VS .Net so that in the near future, I can deliver a solution on that platform as well.
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>One should keep his options open...