Arthur,

I totally agree with you. VFP is a threat to more than one of Microsoft's "Natural" children.

When it comes right down to it, it's all about money. Why would Microsoft want to sell a $300 or $400 product to a company that will handle ALL of their data management requirements when they can sell them three of four more expensive products do the same thing.

Many of the major brokerage firms, banks and universities in Manhattan use FoxPro extensively. Being a consultant in these environments I see lots of cool data-intensive applications developed in a variety of languages. IMO, two of the best were developed with Visual FoxPro. I also see the same animosity among corporate developers at is evident between Microsoft and FoxPro. A dysfunctional relationship effects everyone involved.

>Perception is everything. It is the perception that Visual Foxpro is somehow a lame language that keeps people who aren't using Visual Foxpro. It is the perception in the minds of project- and HR-managers, of Visual Foxpro somehow akin to the old xBase stuff of the late eighties and early nineties, which keeps the pay scale down for those using Visual Foxpro.
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>It has always seemed to me that Foxpro (and VFP) is the "redheaded stepchild." It seemed purchased only for certain programming technologies that were a component of the product, and I don't seriously believe that anyone thought it would still be around as long as it has. It exists in a land of limbo, of course far more advanced than the thing that starts with an "A" and which people call a database, and yet much lower-priced than the bigger thing that uses the SQL language and cost s a lot more. It hinders the marketing effects of both, you see. Perhaps another reason it isn't marketed well is because it doesn't utilize the Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code that some guy at the helm is quite fond of. But then again, you have to know more than the Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code to use it.
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>Yet Visual Foxpro has the major components of the SQL language, much to the amazement of those DBAs who like to claim that their knowledge is somehow superior. It has object-oriented components to the language that are quite similar to Java. Let's not forget that the essential database engine component kicks butt! Other environments such as VB don't have a built-in engine, yet VB programmers I've met seem to turn their noses up at Foxpro.
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>It is because of the perception thing.
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>They don't know what it can do. They're actually inept, and steadfast in their ineptitude, and refuse to believe Foxpro can do what it can. C programmers don't realize it can make API calls (unless of course it has to pass a pointer to a complex structure).
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>This said, how could anything change?