Kevin,

I've been a Mere Mortals developer since 1997. I have built my career around VFP and Mere Mortals. Now I am at a crossroads. I don't intend to jump on the .NET bandwagon. The company I will be working for is committed to VFP and SQL Server. They understand the value VFP brings to their organization and have no need to jump into Microsoft's latest technology. This works well for me. I love VFP and enjoy working with it.

What makes this job exciting is that they intend to rewrite their entire system from the ground up using a Codebook Framework. The two frameworks being evaluated are Visual Fox Express and Mere Mortals. I have to tell you, I am concerned about the future of Mere Mortals for VFP.

F1 Technologies is committed to continually upgrading their product. They have a full development staff and a huge installed base. Training materials are readily available. Oak Leaf, on the other hand, is basically a one-man-shop. The only employees of the company are you and your wife. (At least that’s the way it was when we last talked.)

I laude your efforts to jump into the .NET fray, but unfortunately you have left behind your VFP user base. Visual Foxpro 8.0 is packed with amazing new features. Many of those features could make Mere Mortals for VFP even more amazing than it already is—that is if you can manage to find the time to incorporate them into the framework, continue improvements to your .NET framework, and stay married to your wife all at the same time. Personally, I know how brilliant you are, but I don’t know if you can manage all that. Somewhere something will break.

What I am asking for is some sort of assurance that you are still committed to your original framework. In good conscience I can’t recommend Mere Mortals to my boss or any of my many colleagues if I don’t think the framework is going to evolve and keep pace with the continual improvements made in VFP. If you are discontinuing support, or phasing it out in favor of .NET, this would be perfectly understandable, but I need to make an informed, intelligent decision and go with it.

If you are indeed committed to upgrading the framework, could you please give us an idea of what improvements we can expect?

Sorry if this message offends or hits too hard at home, but your website says you are committed to brutal honesty and integrity, so I figure you can handle it and respond in kind.

Regards,

James M. Weil, III
Author/Developer