Hi All,

A lot has been said in heated, and sometimes personal, debates about VFP and its future. Most of it in threads that were not about that at all - "thread drift" is an understatement :) Here’s a thread that is perhaps more suitable to air our views, and to kick off here are some of my thoughts:

MS continue to develop and enhance the VFP product line. This is self evident with the release of VFP7, VFP7 SP1, VFP8, VFP8 SP1, soon VFP9. This is a good sign that I can continue to leverage my investment in VFP. Not exclusively, since a developer should always be on the lookout for other options and solutions, but certainly my VFP investment is safe for the "foreseeable future" (in IT world time frames).

VFP is one of very few tools that I know of that has a seamlessly integrated database engine that is stable and very fast.

VFP is an excellent database development tool that should be considered for those database applications where the end-user does not require the features provided by a database server solution. It is a viable and excellent development tool for providing solutions to numerous wide-ranging applications.

VFP is great for building shrink-wrap systems in vertical markets. The evidence is overwhelming in the existence of so many of these types of applications from all around the world and in small and large organizations.

VFP is great if you don’t want to get involved with per seat licensing arrangements.

VFP is probably not great if you are looking for a job in a large corporate IT department. Most large company IT departments are towing the MS party line. Whether this is right or wrong, smart or stupid, is irrelevant. "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" is the guiding principle for these corporate lifers.

This means that developers looking at this avenue for earning a living need to enhance their skills with database server knowledge and/or .Net and/or Unix or its variations and/or Java and/or other open source options, etc. Which is probably a good idea anyway as increasing ones knowledge is just a good idea generally.

One of the fairest advantages vs. disadvantages of VFP that I have read can be found at http://www.clearform.com/visual_foxpro.htm. It’s worth a read.

For developers looking to build shrink-wrap systems and running their own business VFP is a great development tool. Not the only option surely, but a great one nonetheless.

On the other hand, .Net is not guaranteed to be the development platform of choice in the future either. Acceptance of a development tool is not just about the tool itself but is influenced by so many external factors as well. Too many times we have all seen development tools come amid all the fanfare and then fall by the wayside. VFP has outlasted many of these to date. (For the record I am also interested in C#.Net).

The open source movement, Linux, Apache, PHP, is huge. Apache runs more web servers than any other competing product. I read that many companies and even entire governments are moving away from Windows and towards open source solutions. This is going to have a huge impact on the acceptance of .Net. And development tools like Java and Delphi are also very popular, powerful, and gaining wide acceptance.

The landscape is not clear and personally I wouldn’t want to forecast the IT world wrongly and then have to repeat the forecast ad nauseum hoping to eventually be right :)