>>Ooooh, shiver! Perish the thought! <bg>
>>>of course. what manager wants a product that works?
>
>What manager wants to make a significant investment in code base for which he or she would have a hard time to find skilled programmers to maintain it? Do all your projects serve the needs of a customer indefinitely?
>

I don't consider 600,000+ VFP developers a small group to mine for coders, for one. I fail to see what the second sentence has to do with the first. If it DID serve the needs of my customer indefinitely, regardless of what it was coded in, then they would be advised to keep skilled resources at hand, wouldn't they?

>That's the advantage that VB has over Fox in the long run. There's a larger pool of talent. There's certainity as to the longevity of the product. And in the realm of emerging Internet and SQL standards, VB is ahead of the game.
>

Much larger pool, granted. 4 million+ compared to the aforementioned 600,000. However, there are a lot of untalented rank amateurs mixed in with that 4 million becuase you don't have to be a good coder or understand databases or structured analysis or OOP or UMT...etc etc to be considered a "VB" programmer. And, granted, there is a certainty to the longevity of the product or at least one like it becuase Gates has a special warm-and-fuzzy for BASIC interpreters.

As to the Internet and SQL, Jack, you are way off base. First of all, VB has little to do with the Internet except for some VBScript you can toss into FrontPage *if* you're too lame to do it the right way and use Java or C++. Secondly, VB recognizes SQL only in that it can send another products SQL calls to it through various database services. VB has *NO* integral SQL standards.

>FoxPro has the OOP advantage, but I am sure that within the next year that VB will have all aspects of OOP. After all, they did not sign on the architect of Borland's Delphi for nothing, just a mere $3 million...
>

VB will not have all aspects of OOP because MS doesn't want to scare off those casual VB developers that don't know OOP from whoops. I'll lay you money that by 10 April 1999 VB will not have as much OOP as VFP does now.

>Regards,
>Jack Mendenhall
>Manager, Information Systems
>Reinsurance Management, Inc.

Most of my most successful enterprise apps using VFP and it's predecesors were developed for your industry, oddly enough. I have written quite a number of financial apps, reinsurance accounting apps, and claims (first dollar and reinsurance) apps in Fox. One that was written in 1988 is still running with a few modifications to this day.