Walter,

I think it's important to keep things in perspective.

I use .Net extensively these days, although I still do Fox at the same time. I write about a lot of the things that are wrong with .Net because those are some of the things that I need to work on and those are the things that other people will find useful. That's the nature of writing often - you write about fixes, hacks workarounds etc. to make something non-obvious work.

I stick to my opinion that WinForms are still lacking within the confines that I mentioned in previous messages here. Mainly performance of the UI, which is abysmal even if compared with VFP which compared to just about anything else is also slow.

But on the other hand you get an environment that is extensible! You can build custom controls and controls that are more efficient than thte stock controls. In fact, I'm using a library called SandBar right now that sort of does this with things like toolbars and menus and greatly improves on native WinForm performance of thsoe components.

The point is that if you really want good performance you can eek it out of the system. You can't do that with VFP for example - you're stuck with what's there for the most part.

And there's plenty of 3rd party activity out there to provide you with what you might need both free and for a fee. Try to get a current Menu/toolbar component that works with VFP these days for example... if you care about building modern looking applications the lack of new ActiveX controls that provide up to date UI is a big issue. And it will only get worse with VFP as there surely won't be very many new ActiveX controls coming out in the future as all those vendors have moved to .Net.

I like a lot of things in .Net including WinForms. It is fun to work in this environment once you get over the hump. And contrary to what some people are saying here the amount of code written is not any more complex than what I used with Fox. If anything the way I have my bus objects and controls set up these days there's less code and better abstraction. That part is software design and although there's more code in the innards of those objects, those objects are also a hell of a lot more flexible than what I could do with VFP.

As anything you need to know your pros and cons and HONESTLY evaluate them. VFP's strength is its local data engine - you can use data for just about anythign. In .Net you have more situations where you'll use collections or other storage mechanism. .Net's strength is it's flexibility and the sheer breadth of functionality available. You can't possibly understand this and see it this way until you use it comfortably. But again that depends on your level of coding too. If all you do is build functional, but ugly data entry forms all day then it will be hard to appreciate the breadth of functionality.

If you're (not you personally) the kind of person that uses SQL statements in your UI front end code then yeah, you will complain that you write ALOT more code that you do in VFP. But if you use business objects or abstract most system objects you access into higher level application objects you will find that the code is nearly identical. I can attest to this as I've just gone through the process of porting the West Wind Web Store from Fox to .Net both the Web interface and the Windows Forms front end for it. I can tell you that the Fox version is not any smaller in terms of lines of code than the .Net version. If anything I think there's less code in the .Net version even though it has a lot more functionality. The power of abstraction.

Performance comparison: Web interface: significantly faster with .Net, Windows Forms Interface: Significantly slower than VFP at least at startup. Once up and running app is slightly slower. Both interfaces are using SQL Server as the backend so this is (subjective) apples to apples comparison.

You guys rooting for VFP really need to get off your high horse to think somebody is trying to rain on your parade about VFP when they're moving or experimenting or saying something nice about .Net. This is not a competition.

Applications aren't only about performance and how many lines of code you write but also about functionality you can provide. And .Net has a much bigger functionality range than VFP does. There's a lot to be said to be using the same tool for desktop, Web, mobile and whatever else comes down the line. Don't underestimate this aspect!

+++ Rick ---






>Bonnie,
>
>>>So why do you disagree with Rick Strahl on this analysis on .NETs winforms ? He is awarded as C# MVP, so it would be fair to regard him as a .NET expert ?
>
>>Notice my sig ... however, that doesn't make me an expert. <g>
>
>I get your point, bu with all the things RickS has been doing with the WEB and .NET I think noone here on the UT is going to doubt he's an expert on the subject.
>
>And I agree I've seen MVPs with less knowledge than other prominent members of this forum, so yes I agree a MVP title does not say all.
>
>Walter,