Hi Mike -

I invoked your name at some other point in this thread remembering when you announced on CIS about 1995 that you were learning C++ in order to have greater job opportunities. The state of the fox market at that time was such that others may have regarded your apostasy as quirky - but of course you were accurately seeing a future direction and I imagine investments you made then in learning something new and moving outside of your comfort zone (where your guru-hood was firmly established) have paid off.

As I see a lot of the fox folks I respect saying to their friends in the community that they are moving toward .NET and suggest others consider it, I am dismayed when I see their motives questioned - almost always by people who don't know them personally and who have a complete misunderstanding of the spirit in which the advice is given. As I said in another message these are folks who always gave very generously of their time and knowledge way out of proportion to the financial rewards. When they share things they've learned about new technologies and about the state of the market they are accused of a hidden agenda.

The ironic thing is, the people getting attacked, because of their reputations, contacts and level of expertise, would have a better chance of surviving in the future using only Fox than most of those attacking them < bg >



>>The way I look at it, if VFP 8.0 were the last VFP (and it is not) I could use it to make a lot of money for another 10 years easily.
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>>But if I had a JOB right now programming in VFP and my daddy didn't own the company and I thought I might need another JOB next year I'd be spending a LOT of time learning .NET.
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>>While there will be no shortage of business problems that can be solved with Fox in the near future, there is currently and will continue to be a shortage of JOBS for VFP developers.
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>Well said, as always. I have been gainfully employed writing FoxPro software for over 10 years but for the past 5 it has been entirely maintenance of legacy systems or keeping my finger in the dike while others rewrite the app in some other language. If anyone is writing new software in VFP in the metropolitan Chicago area (population 8 million) it's news to me. I have been keeping up with all the cool new features in VFP 8 -- and they ARE cool -- but sometimes I wonder why I bother. There is no reasonable expectation of having an opportunity to use them. So I invest my learning time in .NET and SQL Server. That's not bitching, that's just saying.
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>Mike