Hi Ken,

First thing I’d like to say is that I have a great deal of respect for you as a person and programmer.

I’ve been a lurker at the UT since I believe, sometime in 1996 and before that on CompuServe. I have contributed very little to the Fox community. Why? I’ve been too busy earning a living, solving small to medium sized business problems using the Fox and before that, it was Dbase, Pascal, basic, etc. I’ve worked 7 day weeks, 16-20 hours/day on many occasions since I started this second career around 1978.

My business has always been a one man shop. I never had anyone to bounce ideas off or to discuss the best way to solve a problem. So, I bought books and third party tools that promised to help me solve my problems. I also always upgraded to the newest version as soon as it came out. I also found that by reading about problems/solutions on the UT and the other newsgroups that others were having the same kinds of problems I was having. I rarely had to ask questions because they had already been posted. So I would sign in, get my answer, sign off and get back to work.

VFP 3.0 was probably the biggest challenge for me to gain proficiency in. Thanks to Whil Hentzen for a book on VFP 3.0, I made the conversion. Since then, VFP has gotten much better and easier to use with each upgrade. Even though VFP 7.0 is feature rich, I still buy third party tools and books to make my job a little easier.

Now to the primary reason for this message:

During the 20+ years that I’ve been programming, I have never been confronted with a business problem that I couldn’t solve, using my tool of the moment. I have had to tell a client that I’d have to do some research first, but I’ve never had to say my tool can’t do that.

Now, because MS has introduced .net, it seems that all I hear is “you need to expand your toolbox”. Well, I don’t need to expand my toolbox. It’s doing exactly what I want it to do, solving my clients problems. Some of my old Clipper Summer 87 programs are still being used! I do want to upgrade them but they’re (clients) happy with what they got.

I believe there are thousands of programmers like me and there are millions of potential clients in the categories we serve.

Until MS proves to us that another way is better, we are going to continue doing things the way we are doing them now. Why should we waste time and money on .net when we are already getting the job done in a very efficient way using our existing tool (VFP)? I very seldom use the following expression, but, I am from the SHOW-ME state so........SHOW ME!

And……..if MS was truly interested in increasing sales of VFP and upgrades, they would find a way. Such as a free trial version. I know it works for me!

I've been recommending MS products to my clients for years and will continue to do so. But, I don't like what I'm reading between the lines concerning VFP's long term future.