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Wake up call to the Fox community.

Looks like the VFP community needs to give some Microsoft PMs a good shake or at least remind others that when speakers write an abstract, they are told to try and "spice it up" and thus say as many inflamatory things as possible. Sound familiar?

Not necessarily Milind, mind you - but when they give conference sessions that have blatant inaccuracies like this "VFP suffers shortcomings in the modern business environment in areas such as disconnected data, security, mobile devices, and more" - then someone should be doing better proof reading over at the MS Teched site.

1. Vista doesn't use DotNet - not as much as everyone was led to believe.

2. VFP (FoxPro) supports Vista - perhaps even moreso than Microsoft would want, if you look at the stuff that Craig et al are doing it.

3. DotNet STILL ISN'T the best solution for everything that developers need. Don't get me wrong - it does some really cool things - but the more MS keeps on pushing, the more push-back they will get.

4. VFP can do security, disconnected data and more. (I believe this article and this article talks about) Yes - it does require some work but no more work than trying to get people to call 5 lines of code instead of 1 to do the same thing.

No - Microsoft doesn't get the extra cash they would get if people were using SQL Server all the time - but hey, you'll get more cash than if you were pushing people to Ruby or another environment.

I know this is only one speaker's session but still, it's this kind of crap that hurts Microsoft's credibility, especially in the FoxPro community.

Where is the session on converting from VB 6 to Dot Net?
Oh I forgot - Remi Caron (the speaker in question) started in Fox but then moved to VB 6 only to jump over to DotNet.

Is there a session on strongly recommending VB 6 developers to move to DotNet because VB 6 is NOT a good platform? Somehow, I don't think so but if there is, please correct me.

At least the session does note that you can stay in VFP - but "...in Vista, .NET is a pragmatic necessity for VFP developers" - that's just not true. At least the Delphi session states it more obviously - "Staying with Win32 may be viable in the short term, but not the long term."

But hey , by that time, I'm sure we'll be up to DotNet 5.0 and a whole new RNWPF (Really New Windows Presentation Foundation). Fact is - most offices still run on machines that can fly by with Windows 98 and survive on Windows XP. I really don't see Vista being that huge an impact for at least another 2 years. And yes, there will be interoperability with DotNet and Visual FoxPro - like there is today. Scare mongering from former VB developers is just a way to try and attract people to their session.

Kevin Ragsdale : Microsoft Urges FoxPro, Delphi Developers to Move to .NET

Comments

Anonymous said…
Oddly enough, Remi's Software Developer Network website has a headline on the front page for a FoxPro Developer's Event, with YAG doing the keynote!

FoxPro Developer Event

Kevin
November 6, 2006 at 10:28 PM
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