>I must agree with you Ed. At the same time I realize that my marketing budget is not as great as Microsofts. My impact upon making corporations and clients embrace a product that Microsoft does not recommend is limited.
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I agree that none of us have the marketing capabilities of MS. But again, I'm being brought in to solve a problem, not necessarily a VFP problem. One reason that I get hired is that I'm not married to the product; while I have considerable expertise in VFP, realistically, less than 25% of my development today involves VFP in the production environment. There have been several cases where I've walked into a project and ended up with the analysis and supervision of the product design, but have lost the implementation because I've been up-front with the client and told them that even if I could do what they wanted in VFP, they'd be better off using another platform or technology where I'm not the right expert. In the short term, it definitely costs me contracts. In the long term, I'm often invited to review and bid on other work down the line because I've established my credibility by saying "This can be done better by someone else."

>I have tried to convince many decision makers to consider VFP. However, the Microsoft team has convinced them that .NET is the way to go. Even when VFP was a part of Visual Studio (versions 97 and 6.0) VFP was not recommended by Microsoft in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay Area.
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>I feel like a man trying to hold back the oceans tide with two hands. I am game to make the attempt but seem to be loosing the battle on a grand scale. Frustration is the word to express my feelings based upon my experience.
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You're lucky; I usually feel like I've got at least one hand tied behind my back! I do lose contracts because I'm not in there spouting the buzzword du jour, and in plenty of cases, I'm sure that I lost because I didn't recommend the latest, greatest, hotest product on the market, and didn't bury the potential client with 4 color glossy propaganda sheets. The only solace I can take from these situations is that in some of the cases at least, I've avoided a work environment that I'm not well suited to; my people skills are most definitely my greatest strength, and I have been known to suffer from foot-in-mouth disease in strategic meetings on more than one occasion, and the likelihood of that type of meeting being thrown increases as the amount of sales hype that preceded the project increases. And when I get a little tired and cranky, tact is the first personality trait that goes out the door for me!

Yes, it would be nice if VFP fell under the comforting blanket of the dotNet initiative; certainly, it would eliminate the number of times that I appear in the role of Sisyphus, or at least make the boulder smaller or the grade of the hill a bit gentler...