>Many years ago I studied the possibility of doing a project in Advanced Revelation. I had a demo version of the program to play with. The idea of multiple entires for a given field seemed like a rather handy feature. Something I have never seen elsewhere, which could give you a much simpler table structure. The project never materialized and I have never had anything further to do with AR. The creater Dick Pick of Orange County California died several years ago. He was a bit eccentric. AR was a spin off of the Pick Operating System.
>
>I attended last night a lecture by Keven McNeish of Mere Mortals. He is coming out with a framework for .Net. He first lectured about the basics of .Net and ADO.Net and ASPX.Net and finished up with a description of many ways of communicating between VFP and .NET. He is currently in Costa Mesa California (in Orange County) teaching his course on .NET for FoxPro developers from a C# viewpoint. He taught a similar course earlier this year in Orange County.
>
>It should be noted that YAG (Y. Allen Griver) used to be a FP guru and is now a head honcho at M$ in VB.Net. Ken Levy had departed to work on XML, etc. and unexpectedly returned to be our head Honcho at M$ for VFP.
>It is important to see where the "gurus" are going. If they segue away from our chosen niche it behooves us to considering moving also. It looks more and more like "What can we do to port as much of our beloverd VP to .Net as soon aspossible". We are a niche now with all that means. Not yet legacy since new versions of VFP keep coming out. Open sourcing VFP might be a good idea, but it is probably already too late for that. Besides, VFP is written in C and C# and how many of our gurus are highly conversant with that? Who would write the code?


IF Microsoft open sourced VFP you'd see a VFP clone in Linux within six months, if not sooner, and several GUI RADs would have dbf/dbc data extensions added to them. That's probably why you'll never see VFP go open source.
JLK









>
>RBase which I spent several years with, still exists and had conferences, etc. in 2002. Even Dbase is still alive and has its own meetings, etc.
>
>Kenn Leland
>
>>>FYI: JVP has responded to this same message posted in the DEVX forum. For those interested http://news.devx.com/cgi-bin/dnewsweb.exe?cmd=article&group=vfp.general&item=5925&utag=
>>>
>>>Rick
>>
>>
>>Rick,
>>I read all the msgs on that thread. "Larry"'s final paragraphs in his final msg summed up the VFP situation.
>>
>>The deja vou thing about it is that I've encountered this phenomena before. Back in the middle 80's I adopted a system based on Pick called Advanced Revelation. It was DOS based and is still more powerful than any dev tool I've used since, including VFP. During the early 90's VB came out and AR Inc. decided they needed a GUI RAD version of ARev to compete. The Compuserve news group began to take a decided downhill flavor after the first beta test of Open Insight 1.5 was released. It was the DOS version wrapped with C wrappers to create a GUI RAD from end. It was slow, buggy and missed many of the features and power of Arev, which is was supposed to emulate. But, AR spent all their money and time pushing OI and neglecting Arev, whose final version was 3.12, IIRC. OI never succeeded in the market place and it was too late to for ARev. Now, 10 years later, there are still people using ARev and there are people using Open Insight, but the numbers are too few to mention.
>Here
>>is a website from 1995, which describes the problem and reflects the attitudes of developers at the time http://the-light.com/arev.html
>>Most of the links are now dead, which reflects the status of ARev and Open Insight.
>>
>>Revelation Tech brags about 1.5 million users all over the globe http://www.revelation.com but how many of you have encountered an ARev installation? Their user conference last month boasted: "For three action packed days between August 14 through 16 2002, over 125 users and developers saw the future of Revelation Software, and they were amazed by it." Check out the PDF that describes the conference. It's a glimps into the VFP future. With few exceptions, I recognized the folks at the show. They were ARev 3rd party product vendors in special niches, or had special relationships with Cosmos or Revelation Technologies.
>>
>>As for me and VFP... I will be supporting VFP apps for the next 5 to 10 years. Why? Because we only began developing many of the apps in VFP 5 only 4 years ago. They now work very well doing what we want the way we want it done. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It would take another 3-4 years using another tool to bring the app developed by that tool to the current state of the VFP apps. That's too much expense for no return. That is a hurdle .NET will have to jump. For new web-centric apps perhaps .NET is the tool. Perhaps not. We are choosing Oracle if it is determined to be a solution for the problem at hand. But, for most data-centric apps where storage *must* be local, VFP, Oracle or something like it is mandatory. (An aside - a similar situation exists for Linux on the desktop. To merely replace Windows functionality, even though Linux is close to free, is a no-return situation. However, License 6 expenses are making the jump to the Linux desktop practical,
>>and developing new apps to solve business problems is less expensive in Linux because of the GPL.)
>>JLK
>>(I must add that that in all of my msgs these are my opinions only and do not express Dept of Rev policy.)