Why the retreat from VFP in a budget conscious economy?

[jbailey268]

This is not a technical question per se but a very important one. I do not know where else I can post this question. I need just a little feedback from those who develop in Foxpro independently or in a FoxPro shop.

Bluntly put, due to the worldwide economic slowdown, I would think Foxpro to the rescue. That statement, of course, is overreaching yet the vast majority of companies I’ve searched for on the internet, who are hiring, describe duties anything and everything that’s not Foxpro. The jobs do require very expensive alternatives to VFP.

A while back there was even some who predicted a corporate dot net meltdown that could have negative ramifications because projects got overly complex and fell behind schedule and over budget. The sentiment was that .NET although a powerful tool is often a more complicated solution than the problem it was trying to solve. In my office experience, what once was four VFP programmers has been “upgraded” to 4 VB .net or c# programmers with now a 5th person being an SQL Admin expert adding a lot of additional costs and development time to the bottom line. Incidentally the backend tables range from (hundreds) to at most 1.2 million rows. There are 2 that approach the 2GB limit. This is a small to mid-sized company. And, even our President said small to mid-size companies comprise the backbone of the economy. We’re all not GM (ha ha). In an age where budgets are critical – why this trend? Why this trend to financial bloat rather than financial relief? I don’t get it. What can be done since Microsoft doesn’t push it as a small business savior?

I’m sorry this was posted here – someone will probably remove it, but before they do; feedback anyone?

 

[DSummZZZ]

In my opinion, one word: Marketing.
Microsoft was pushing Visual Studio and SQL because they could make more money selling the individual packages than they could by selling a product that did everything those packages could do, but cost less.

The tricky part - which it seems they managed quite well - was convincing developers it was better and easier to use than Fox.

But what can be done is point how how much development time can be saved by using an environment you are most familiar and comfortable with.
If that environment is not Fox, then so be it. But in my case, we have tons of Fox code, tables and so on. To start with a new environment and retrofit would be cost effective or productive.



-Dave Summers-

Even more Fox stuff at:

http://www.davesummers.net/foxprolinks.htm

 

[dbMark]

Visual FoxPro is a victim of its success. A developer only has to pay about $600 for the program/language, then can develop all the standalone end-user applications desired. No extra licenses or fees back to the seller, Microsoft. Sure, you have the option to write your code as the front end for SQLServer, but you don't have to, you can use free tables or databases.

But it's different with .Net where the program language (such as VB.Net, etc) is separate from the database (SQLServer). Microsoft makes money not just for .Net but also the many seat/user licenses for SQLServer, especially as Microsoft was pushing license structures that promised all upgrades but required licensing renewals.

There surely are other reasons why there was no VFP 64-bit development, no effort to bring it back into Visual Studio, but those are the ones we developers see.

 

[gfrlaser]

Add to that, so many people making very, very complicated programs using Access. I have three projects going now that were created in Acess that are now hopelessly broken and no one can fix. Patches galore over time. I am simply rewriting the entire projects in Fox. Takes only a few hours, easy to add features to, easy to understand. Every supervisor I have worked with on these projects already has basic grasp of dbase and in the process is learning that once I write it, they can work with it.