David

A few weeks ago we rewrote a VFP interface app using C#. On my Inspiron PIII with Win 2000 the VFP version processed 3 word documents per second, the C# version on a P4 2Mhz with 512 RAM processed 1 document per second. The Word interface seemed to be very slow in C#. Anyway we decided it was unworkable and abandoned the C# version until V2.

This is not "fear of technology" or any of the other slogans but "it's too slow". Maybe we did it wrong but that's what happened to us. We will review when the next version comes out because we want to do a C# version.

Next is database access. Overall we're pretty pleased with ADO.NET, BUT... Raw VFP speed using LIKE queries is so much faster using VFP directly with our tables that we could not contemplate "upgrading".

In addition, we see no way to protect our IP in C#.

So the data munging stuff is going to stay in VFP until we see a very good reason to change.

Now, as for what people say about "productivity": I'd have to say that writing http server components in C# is far harder than VFP using (say) West Wind. E.g. replicating multi-part form stuff for the Word development mentioned above required us to parse and create multipart messages from scratch in C#. We look forward to productivity frameworks in C#, till then it's a bit like creating forms in code without an IDE. In addition, we tried to seek advice on this issue and realised that there simply isn't an "expert" community to assist yet. The only useful answer we got was from... Rick Strahl.

Overall: we can see where dotNET is going and why, but it is extremely new- about where Java was in 1997 when I jumped across to my eternal regret. I can't help but wonder whether dotNET "delivered" apps so far were delivered as part of a race or to prove "coolness" rather than as a result of pure technical decisionmaking. My advice is that if people need to deliver to be paid, they might as well wait until the bleeding-edgers have found all the problems and there is a choice of frameworks before risking income on it. Otherwise you'll have to rewrite, just like you rewrote your first VFP3 app. < g > We can learn from that. Till then people should learn and experiment as much as they can with as many languages as they can cope with.

Regards

JR