One important aspect missing in your list is multi-platform support.

I used xBASE for most of my programming life, know Visual FoxPro better than other languages, and would very much prefer to program in it.

Also, I think that VFPs features are adequate for building commercial applications - and it is likely that the feature set will continue growing.

However, the fact that it only runs on Windows may simply make it impractical for many, now that entire countries are trying to switch to Linux.


>Hi all
>
>Thanks for the responses, what I would like to do is start from the top and drill-down if necessary, I'll try my best to get the obvious ones out of the way first, which will hopefully lead to more discussion, probably a bad time to start being near xmas, but oh well. I'm also using C# mainly as the comparison, as I feel this is the language of choice for .Net.
>
>OO
>
>Visual FoxPro
>
>Some things that aren't directly supported in VFP (although not major faults):
>
>Abstract classes
>Interfaces
>Sealed classes (not allowing inheritance)
>Internal properties/methods
>Static methods/properties
>Operator overloading
>Override Methods (or Shared in VB)
>Garbage-collection (need I say more?)
>......Please add more, I'm pretty sure there are some.
>
>C#/VB
>
>If what you want is OO, .Net is the way to go, it's major strength is that the languages are fully OO, although C# supports a few more bits than VB, from what I hear VB will be implementing some of these soon. The only missing part is multiple-inheritence, but I feel interfaces are cleaner in this respect, and you can implement multiple interfaces.
>
>Local Data-Engine
>
>Visual FoxPro
>
>I don't think I really need to go into much detail here, if VFP's data-engine was half as good as it is now, it would still be awesome.
>
>C#/VB
>
>ADO.Net is a VFP developers nightmare come-true, although I will say that once you get used to it, it isn't that bad, but IMO, the only way to ease the pain with ADO.Net is to write your own classes that handle the fiddly stuff. Other dis-advantages, it's slow, even for manipulating data held in memory, it's OO (not a bad thing, but can take a bit of getting used to if you aren't confident with OO) and p*ssing about with connections, using the right .Net classes etc. can be a bit of a nightmare.
>
>IDE
>
>Visual FoxPro
>
>The simple, clean and un-cluttered VFP environment is actually very nice, something I will say is that we've had to wait too long for intellisense to come along, but now it's in it's even nicer. It takes seconds to output the results of a program to the Console and the command-line is well, an awesome addition.
>
>C#/.Net
>
>Cluttered, and takes a bit of getting used to, the intellisense is at it's best and errors in code are picked up as you're going along - very nice.
>
>One thing that still get's to me is - where is the command-line?? It's difficult not to miss it when it's gone.
>
>The Market
>
>Bit of a touchy subject, and maybe uneccessary, as many people have pointed out, most people have different "types" of market, there is the market that uses "buzz-words" and there is the "How fast can you get it in there" market.
>
>I still think you can market VFP based on how rapidly you can develop a working application and how well it will perform, but there is still the ".Net is the latest and greatest...blah blah" going around to counter-act this.
>
>I won't comment too much on the market, I think it may interfere too much with what I'm trying to achieve.
>
>It's only my opinion
>
>From my point of view, that is all I can comment on at the time, I'm not an expert in .Net, above is only my observations so far, what I want is people to correct me if I'm wrong, add another section, things like strong-typing, intellisense, development time, flexibility, scalability, garbage-collection, more about OO, data-engine, web-based apps, windows-based apps, what about ASP.Net?, COM+/.Net assemblies, the compiler etc.
>
>Please add some more, or correct me, whatever, I'll keep a document back with "everyones" input.
>
>Thanks