>How did the turn-around come about?

Terry,

Telling the entire story would take several pages. Suffice it to say, however, that the information I brought back on VFP vs. PB and VFP itself was significant. Also significant was my direct superior's attendance of the .NET classes. It seems that it convinced him not only to drop PB, but pick up Fox as well. In a coversation I had with him yesterday, it appears that I'll be teaching him VFP because he wants to learn it.

Another source was the amount of time it was taking 4-5 PB programmers (contractors were brought in) to develop and deploy an application. Most significantly, a project with the code name "Oasis" took them 14 months. I also helped with this project by writing a COM DLL in VFP that didn't most, if not all, of the calculations. I then designed a test application that did basically most of the interface stuff that the real application did. That took about 4 days. Now admittedly, they had a lot of other stuff to cover (updating data on a mainframe, retrieving data from there, etc.), but the fact of the great difference in development time I think also played a role.

The bottom line was that they needed to become more productive. The choices were: Adding me as a PB/Java programmer or them learning .NET and VFP. While the first choice is obviously the easiest road, it wasn't the best. Fortunately, I think, the best choice was made.