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Koziol: The fear is the .Net Framework itself.

John continues his piece on the "World of Tomorrow".



While it is definitely pro-fox, consider the contrast between Part III, where he discusses how tough the DotNet framework can be, to Part IV, where he talks about the difference in community.



Now,he doesn't note DotNetNuke, which is a free (as in beer) framework for content management and there are a lot of free or low-cost how to's for DotNet. (VFPx isn't the only tool in the CodePlex)



Now, John isn't just another FoxPro developer spilling his gripes - he did work for Microsoft at one time - and as he says , over the last 18 months, he has led and worked with various development teams on DotNet projects. Frightening?



Sounds like it. " It is so, so easy to "blow up" Visual Studio apps", " A small behavioral tweak may cause 2 or 3 developers days to complete." - maybe this is why existing Fox developers have moved to creating frameworks (like Milos and MereMortals) to make it easier.



Rick Strahl wrote an article a while back about how it's useful to understand the underlying approach when attempting to build useful code - John makes the point that while it's nice to know all the cool underlying things (as evidenced by the Hacker's Guide), you don't HAVE to know it to get it working.





I've worked quite a bit in DotNet but I am not, by any means, an expert. I recall at the first DevTeach, someone made the comment that it would take a huge amount of code to write a function in DotNet that was similar to a FoxPro function. (I can't for the life of me remember the function)



Within about an hour, a DotNet developer came back and said "what do you mean? Just use Regular Expressions." While correct, I think they missed the

point - a single function that has been around in VFP for years and that is fairly readable would be replaced with a Regular Expression string, which is tough to even start to understand. (What does \b\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\b mean?)



As John noted -
Things that were simple are now inordinately complicated. - will they get easier with Orcas?



I hope so...How are you dealing with the differences with other development environments? Have you found a easier programming environment?





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Comments

Anonymous said…
Absolutely.

Python.

Simple, clean syntax. Extensive library. Fairly easy transition from Foxpro.
Garrett said…
I think it's a regexp for validating an IP address, but it's not nearly complete enough. :-)
Gonzo said…
Andrew are you saying it's scary that I manage .Net projects? Should I be insulted? :-)

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