I think the proper positioning is not "VFP or .NET", my opinion is that the VFP+.NET is the best combination. Most of contemporary enterpise intranet apps are web-based and highly data-driven (or at least all new developments are in this area). VFP is great for data-driven part on middle-tier, .NET is great for request routing or for less data-intensive part. With this combination we beat Java guys and deliver several times faster and with better overall quality. VFP does the job - we have a complete portal s/w (http://www.arnicacorp.com) in VFP and it is very stable. With one of our customer, we have 50+ COM packages running for several thousand of internal users and it is rock-solid (after COM services rolup update 18), and there are no memory leaks. Just do it right (and do not try to create Yahoo with VFP). .NET. in the mean time, has memory leaks in its reflection classes, which gave us constant headaches.

I agree with you - potentially, .NET garbage collection is better, yes, it is self-descrining. I do not agree that security is comprimised. .NET stability is theoretically better, however, VFP is not too bad unless you requild Yahoo with VFP. I suggest NOT consider VFP as database tool at all (I think that this is where Microsoft had wrong marketing move) - this is a middle-tier tool, which is excellent at post-processing data of local importance after they were retrieved from SQL sERVER, Oracle, etc. And I could give you many examples where Java is banned because of its bad reputation too... :) I think that what has wrong reputation is client/server, associated with VFP, and customers just have no idea that they could build excellent web-portal based systems with the fox.

Igor.