John

The concepts and principles should stand on their own.

Yes, if expressed that way as a notional discussion. But if all that gets presented is a conclusion with damnations attached, the above is not the issue any more.

to many, ANY comment that is pro-.NET is often taken as anti-VFP. Further, many of these same people take ANY critique of VFP as being anti-VFP.

Possibly. Possibly the tone of the message affects its reception as well.

Whether or not a VFP-head gets transformed is 100% up to the VFP-head. It is his/her career livlihood on the line. Whether the most die-hard of VFP-heads change or not - I could care less becuase my points are no more or less valid by their unwillingness to change.

But that is just truism. If one is truly interested in helping, surely the answer is not to provide sensational damnations of the development tool used by many here and then criticise those who take it personally, but to provide dispassionate examples where dotNET would provide a real lift to them. Also to acknowledge where dotNET provides no advantage so far- and there are real life scenarios where that is true.

Take multi-threading, for example. VB had multithreading for years and did not cause a mass exodus of VFP people. How could multi-threading help in dotNET? If all people hear is that "dotNET can multithread and you would need to cobble something together to mimic that in VFP" then people might reasonably respond "OK, but so what". If one expands the concept to look at pooling and handling of multiple data requests, suddenly the slogan has a visible, specific dotNET meaning.

I will tell you that I know of a rather high profile VFP/DBF app in a company that is getting rewritten in Java/Oracle. Why does that project have a good shot at success? For one thing, you don't hear statements like "In VFP, we do it like this...."

Well, I don't know of the project, but I'm sure there are a number of considerations that come before the one you nominate. For a start, Oracle has specific Java functionality that makes a huge difference. In addition, if Java is used then I'm assuming it will be a server-based app, presumably a HTML/dHTML app? In which case many of the fat client concerns and even traditional security concerns are replaced by a whole new set. As it is, the example remains mysterious with little to offer listeners except support for a previous equally mysterious damnation of VFP.