Well I am one who has done at least 6 distinct languages in depth and 4 platforms in my career and I can tell you that I have no "fear" of .NET AND I have always pushed for MS to market VFP better.

I dare say that most of us who have pushed MS to better market VFP do so from a desire to grow the user base and decidedly NOT out of fear of change. We see a growing user base as the best insurance to keep VFP as a product within MS and to assure continued development of the product.

There are many people who have learned that it is not always in our own best interests to jump into whatever MS is promoting today. Many of us find it amusing that one day MS has a great product and the next day, when its successor is announced, that formerly great product was actually full of holes and lacking in countless features.

It is one thing to jump into the latest MS gizmo of the day but it is another thing to accuse those who do not as timid or fearful. This attitude suits MS perfectly, of course, because the planting of ANY doubt in the minds of non-converts is helpful to their cause.

I hope this little diatribe can help to put to rest this idea that those who, at this time, continue to develop with VFP are backwards and fearful and have identified too closely with their tool of choice. Most of us are simply continuing to use a very very useful tool while MS continues its work to get .NET past the stage of adolescence.

Jim

>>I think you are totally INCORRECT here - it has nothing to do with fear of change!!!
>>
>>I don't know how you could even conclude such a thing, so it makes it really hard to argue the point without knowing the basis for your statement. Can you please elaborate?
>
>First, i'd like to mention i didn't meen to offend anyone with this statement. It is my personal opinion that fear of changes is what drives all these "Marketing VFP" discussions. Why ?
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>Because of my own experience with the fear of changes, yes at some point in time i was afraid of changes. I started programming about 15 years ago using COBOL on Xenix System V and later on SCO Unix.
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>With years, windows came out and i had to retool. I learned FP 2.6 and started wring apps with it. I remember how terrorized i was with this enormous learning curve ahead of me, not only i had to learn a new language but also a brand new operating system. But i made it.
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>Then came VFP. About 4-5 years ago i realized there was no way to convert our FP 2.6 app to VFP without a full rewrite. This was a painful fact and again the fear came back. But i made it again, picking up also some very usefull technologies like COM+ and SQL server.
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>Today, .NET is here and look very promissing, there is lots of features in .Net we don't have in VFP and would be impossible to built-in VFP without breaking backward compatibility of existing apps. So here we are again... Should i be afraid again, not really, i know i'll make it again.
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>I know this today, because i've been there. Some haven't, and by trying to make MS market VFP, they hope it will be there forever and wont have to face re-tooling and re-write.
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>VFP is a great product and i use it every day. But i kwow from experience that it will end and we will have to move on.
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>Stephane