> In his world, anything written in FoxPro was in that category, simply because it wasn't in Oracle, in spite of the fact that the FoxPro app actually did its job very well. I think that too often the tool is dismissed by those who don't know what it really can do. />

I agree. Even Official Microsoft Developers don’t get it.

I’m just getting back into the Fox grove after a 7 year break. Been spending the last 7 years in the open source world (Python, PHP, Apache, and Linux). Recently, I was asked to consultant on a gig at a big real estate company that was trying to get its listings online. They wanted a front end so their agents could update their listings and serve them to the public (along with video, pictures, etc…) via their website – nothing too fancy. The current consultants were “Microsoft Solution Providers” – they actually used VB with Access. The project was late, buggy and, well just a mess. :) Why they didn’t use Fox or even VB with SQL Server is beyond me. Maybe it was the cost of MS SQL? When I finally asked about FoxPro they said Fox couldn’t do the job. Even I knew that that wasn’t true. Those consultants aren’t there now. I’m on the job and we are now using FoxPro with MySQL as a backend. So I’ve come full circle. And I have paid for a copy of FoxPro. FoxPro is 1 of 2 closed source programs (besides Windows) I actually use – Dreamweaver being the other.

I have to make a statement about .NET. What’s the big deal? Any language can be used with .NET. Third parties have already released VS .NET plug-ins for Python, Perl, XSLT, Ruby, even Cobol. If MS doesn’t “connect” FoxPro to the .NET Framework someone else will. Also, I don’t have a problem seeing where “FoxPro “fits”. There are plenty of gigs who don’t require or care what product you use. They just want it to work. Fox is a great general all purpose tool running on Windows. It connects very well with anything. In fact the Fox/MySQL connection is working very well for us. I do see a certain Fox bias out there. But, who fault is that? Maybe more of the Fox community should take a lesson from the open source community.