>Everyone - thanks for the links and ideas, they're helpful. I still have to figure out how to distill all of this info. It seems I almost need to different versions - one for tech. people, and one for business people.
>
>Or, in addition to "Why", maybe I should come up with a list of the common misconceptions about VFP and argue each point (maybe I should have named this thread, "Why NOT VFP"). Let's see:
>
>- Isn't FoxPro dead?
>- Isn't it an outdated language (like COBOL)?
>- File-based databases suck because (fill in any reason).
>- I've got a friend who says VFP x is the last version.
>- If it's not part of .NET, that means it's (dead/not supported/etc).
>- I've got a friend who's company had a VFP project crash and burn, therefore, VFP is bad (who is this "friend" and where can I meet him/her to slap some sense into them??)
>- .NET is the wave of the future, therefore we should drop all VFP development right now.
>- I won't be able to find any VFP developers to help me if you go away/die/disappear.
>
>Does anyone have any others they've heard?

Yeah - rumor # etc: "When vfp *was* in VS, it was added in there by MS to gently kill it off by merging it with VB." (No winning for vfp, whether vfp was included in VS or not :-)

Your point about IT depts is a good one. Here, most of the strongest anti-vfp people have left, fortunately (the ones who would not even look at vfp, and only vaguely recalled DOS Fox for their "decision-making information base.").

The problem here is a larger one against MS products (I prefer mostly-MS products since we use mostly all MS products *anyway* - not because I love MS, but simply because they tend to inter-operate better with each other). The problem is that the top IT brass don't want us using *any* MS development tools or DBs, most especially .NET and MS SQL Server. The logic is that since we are a public agency using tax money, and since we use almost all other MS products (Win2K Server, WinXP, Office XP, Exchange Server, etc., they want to "balance our software and spending" by using a fair percentage of non-MS products (for some years, it was PB & Sybase (though since the Sybase death rumors have started, now we are migrating to Oracle, and the front-end tools are still up for grabs. Naturally, all the developers & server-DB people simply love switching DBs for all our large apps, let alone switching dev tools :-) (BTW, no Linux at all allowed either)

I'm one of the few admins outside the IT loop able to make my own dev-tool product decisions, so I can use vfp all I want - but no MS SQL Server even if our lives depended on it, that's a very "hard" rule here. If I want a non-native backend, it's gotta be Sybase (or now Oracle). That's the gov't for you. The people still running much of the IT at the very top are old mainframe folks with *no clue* about the 2003 environment and tools, I probably don't need to add...I am trying to get a word in edgewise about both vfp & .NET with the powers that be, whenever I have a chance.