This is only indirectly related, Claudio, but I think it's 'interesting'...

A very long time ago, in a mainframe shop far far away, there was an appliction system that was serving its users and the company very very well.

After a new manager arrived and he hired a few of his buddies to significant positions they came to the conclusion that it was very important to completely re-write that application to be positioned to adopt new technologies that were coming down the road.
They presented their plan to the user groups and included nice new hardware including color screens and faster report turnaround and a few other goodies. They were met with a resounding 'no way Jose!' The users were very happy at this time with their system, which had been tweaked to their specific needs over many years.
So the (new) IS management team was now in a difficult position because they WANTED to adopt the new technology and had enunciated NEEDS for it to the user groups yet they were told no (which, by the way, is NOT a good thing for any new management team to hear).
So they came back to the users with a proposal to re-write their application so that it performed EXACTLY AS TODAY in every respect but simply would use the modern stuff to accomplish it.
Of course the users couldn't say no to such a proposal so they agreed on the condition that "EXACTLY AS TODAY" meant exactly "EXACTLY AS TODAY". The boys had their project and everyone was happy!
Then they began to examine the existing application in detail, because of course they had to to be able to duplicate it. And they called many meetings with different users to learn how things flowed in (manual) procedures related to the system. SO many meetings that the users felt they had to object to the inordinate amount of time being spent by their staff in useless meetings (they were frequently repetitive and had started to ask staff things like 'well what about if we did ... instead'). Eventually the team presented their migration plan to the user groups and they would not accept a 'phased approach' with 2 systems running side-by-side and rquiring repetitive entry and a few other problems. So the team developed a one-shot convert over the weekend approach wich was acceptable to the user groups.
They were now ready to present the entire plan to their own management. It was something along the lines of 3 years and 450 man-months and lots of development hardware and software and (IS) staff training... LOTS AND LOTS of $$$. And, as it was told, the Vice President asked... 'and all this just to give them exaclty what they have now? And you're not kidding?' The project was rejected, the new(ish, by now) manager fired the folks he had hired ('friends' until...) and then the manager himself was fired shortly afterwards.

And, by the way, I think scenarios like this plus tighter than ever $$$ situations all around are what will be the biggest impediments to the widespread adoption of .NET.

regards

>Hi Stephen;
>>
>>Our company is currently rewriting our VFP7 application in .NET. While we believe moving to .NET is a good idea for the future of the company, we don't want to entirely drop our VFP experience. Our application has a number of our supporting apps that handle data exchange with other systems, we plan to leave them in VFP.
>>
>>My question to you is that are there plans to improve on the communication between Europa and .NET? And is having these 2 languages running side-by-side in the grand scheme? For example, XMLTOCURSOR should create multiple cursors if the originated ADO.NET dataset has multiple datatables (does it do that in VFP8?). I didn't see anything about this in the November newsletter you wrote.
>
>Pardon me for jumping in your thread.. But, please.. Just for curiosity..
>
>I never understood which reasons makes a whole team to quit all of their current investment (knowledge, researches, etc..).. I mean, to makes that kind of change, it is necessary the team's excitement (That's ok, new horizons always do that).. It is necessary money and time (of course)..
>
> My central point is.. to move to dotNet and produces all the "rewrites", a lot of changes (quite expressive) must be justified for everybody (company leaders, team leaders and end-users/developers staff)
>
> Would you mind to share with us.. Where is (in your case) the most expressive reasons ? What was the most important points to decide for other philosofy..
>
>
>TIA
>
>Claudio