Perry

FWIW, if you want to look in Compuserve archives you will see that "John Ryan" and others began urging MS to market VFP better in 1994-1995. Even then FP was increasingly marginalised and a perceived risk for middle management. You will also see that "internal MS marketing" is not a new idea, a group of us also urged that back in 1995.

It looks as if Ken Levy is actually having a crack at internal marketing as opposed to the soothing soundbites we got before and the "tell me the names of MS staff who badmouth VFP so I can do nothing" sort of stuff.

Anyway, in 1995 we were looking forward to good marketing from MS when VFP came out. Not everybody agrees but I still think MS did a crap job, possibly because all the "wow!" was going to Win95. VFP of course was the first mainstream tool that could create proper Win32 COM apps for Win95.

Anyway, when nothing happened and it seemed obvious that "damning with faint praise" was all we could expect from MS, I acted on my own advice and left VFP for Java. At the time that was the most "obvious" and viable option.

In hindsight, I lost a year by leaping to Java before it was a proven tool and before its bugs had been ironed out by other leapers.

If the "message" is that we should all be looking at other tools, of course we all agree. Creating Word dlls to bypass macro security, for example, seems impossible with VFP so we use VB. Knowing something about VB makes this an easier hurdle.

IMHO it would behove all of us, not just those who contract, to review dotNET and java. Instead of playing AOE in the evenings, a bit of cursing over C# is probably a better option. < g >

But the suggestion that people should launch themselves directly into dotNET, may actually harm people. That would be similar to my decision to leap into Java when it was also new and exciting. Had I hesitated, stayed productive in VFP and learned Java, I might even have made more of a success of Java which I ended up abandoning because I could not deliver products fast enough.

Finally, it seems likely that frameworks *will* appear for dotNET. This will have issues for maintenance and employing staff. If people can learn now and consider the business issues once the frameworks come out, that seems a very wise decision to me.

Of course people may differ with my opinion and if they do I hope thay will explain their circumstances and why they reached their decision. I do not know everything and I hope I will keep learning until the end.

Regards

JR