Chris;

Well expressed and I am with you. Here is my personal take on this topic which I would like to share.

Developing software allows me to make an income, support my family and help our daughter in her third year of college at UCLA. Our son just graudated from college and is a teacher.

Trying to survive economically is important to me. I like to be aware of what the software market is doing and go in that direction. You must have as many opportunities as possible to be an active part of the software development community. Limiting yourself to one tool is dangerous.

I spent many years of my life being educated and working as an electronics engineer. I realized when it was time to move to another career that paid well and here I am in the software world.

Analogies are awkward at best. If I had remained in electronics, I think I would be divorced and homeless. We just celebrated our 38th wedding anniversary. My advice to all is to be aware of what your career market is doing. You may have to shift software development tools or even your career to survive.

I am not one to cry about yesterday. If I were my world would have ended 13 years ago when I left engineering. Remember it is only a matter of survival. Putting your head in the sand may feel good to some but I would not suggest that as a long term goal! :)

Tom


>>Just can't do it *my* way, can ya, John ??
>>Woo Hoo !!
>
>Why should anybody do it *your* way? What if they can't speak Greek or Turkish?
>
>If I was going to call MS Support I would simply call the Australian MS Number and talk to my friendly MCP Contact in MS - Very helpful they are, but more than likely I would just ask a question on this very forum - more helpful than MS could ever be.
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>If I rang Dell about a new PC and got put through to their Indian call center I would probably get equally as stupid answers from them - heck - I might as well ask them how to reindex a table in VFP! they would probably just tell me to reinstall windows either way.
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>I think a few people on this forum are taking their love of VFP too far. And threads like this one (and the "OMG why isn't VFP on the MS Italy site?" one as well as others) only prove JVPs point that he has been trying to get across over the past few months (years?), there is absolutely no point ringing overseas call centers to ask stupid questions. I don't completely agree with everything JVP has to say, but when you guys (not JVP, but you VFP Die Hards) carry on like this... Well it doesn't look good.
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>My only point is that there are people on this forum who seem to be scared - that is the best way I can describe it - of anything that isn't VFP related and the possible fact that they may be forced to learn something new at some point in the next 15 years.
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>Yes we still use VFP8, but we are starting projects in .Net simply because that is what the market wants and there are 2 really major reasons for this:
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>1. there are some companies (that we really want as customers - top 10 in Australia etc.) who refuse to use any software that isn't J2EE or .Net. - and by picking .Net we are losing out on the 50% who want J2EE.
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>2. there are others who simply want us to do things that VFP can't - I am talking about UI features mainly, VFP doesn't cut it when you have to make your app *look* impressive to sell it - your average office employee doesn't care if we use the latest and greatest vfp cursor adapter to simulate some neat J2EE/.Net/VB/Whatever data access feature, they care that we can't make use of some UI control that they saw in some other MFC app etc. so we lose a customer simply because of a wierd grid box etc.
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>So you see, you can go on and on and on about how we can do *anything* in VFP, and while it is true that we can pretty much simulate any data access routine etc (and in some cases implement a much better *technical* implementation - I won't argue with that) you can't simulate things in the UI particularly, for example - some customers are adament that the toolbar has to look like the office XP or 2003 toolbars, which may seem rediculous, but you can't do it in VFP so we will have to use .Net - or how about the SysAdmin who wants to be able to manage our program from within the MMC framework?
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>And we have developed a few things in .Net and are using it from within VFP, for example we developed a user security management module using .Net for a future project and we also set it up to run from within our current VFP app using COM Interop - the form pops up by clicking a button on a VFP form, the user doesn't care that it is in .Net or VFP, the user just cares that the form does what they want.
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>IN CASE YOU DIDN'T GET MY POINT:
>VFP Can do *anything* but it can't do *everything* - I.e. it isn't a hammer and the world isn't your nail. And some of that *everything* isn't even technical, it is simply the (some would say biased) opinion of the people in the business world today, and if MS - based on sound accounting practices - decides that putting all their call center staff through VFP training for that 1 call they might recieve is a waste of time, or that putting VFP information on the Estonian MS Website isn't worth the effort, or even decides spending money on the electricity for Kens office then that is their decision, and more power to 'em.
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>OK, I just thought of another point I wanted to bring up, there is a huge amount of FUD flying about in this forum, both on the .Net side and the VFP side, Things like the VFP people saying that all your investment in .Net is going to come to nill in Longhorn because of XAML - and people who say things like "you could do that in 3 lines in VFP" without any further example of those three lines (Can't remember the actual thread - I am sure JVP would, he commented on it to the guilty part about 2 weeks ago I think) - People like that should realise there are many things you can do in .Net just by setting a single property that take pages of code to do in VFP8 - Form and controls resizing for example (Yes I know it is coming in VFP9).
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>And also the .Net people - .Net isn't the new silver bullet (or replacement hammer) yes I know VFP will die when my table gets to 2GB, do I care? No, *I* don't, the nature of my program means the DB will probably never even reach 2GB in *total*. Why try and scare people away from VFP with stuff like this? Yes, SQL Server might be better, but not if your users don't have the skill to manage it.
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>I thought about starting a new thread to raise my point on this and other things a few weeks ago, but figured I would rather not clutter up the UT with another pointless thread (yes, I do think what I just wrote is pointless) because there might be some people starting to use VFP and they don't want to see the UT filled with cr*p like this thread (in fact I know of 2 people who will be starting to use VFP for the first time on monday morning) - but I felt this sort of thing has gone on long enough and I haven't had a say on it yet, so this is my opinion, I don't know if you will hear more from me on this topic - I would rather just let it be and try and help people use VFP.
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>Regards,
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>Chris Ormerod