Thursday, May 03, 2007

I'd Like To, But....

I got Markus's postcard in the mail this week. Very clever marketing, a personal message about how he could help with converting to .Net. Some people need that help.

There are a lot of folks not happy with aggressive abandonment of Visual FoxPro; folks who I will not name out of respect. But I will say that I am wholeheartedly one of them.

Don't get me wrong, the VS suite is ...err... sweet. Once you have a grip on the framework, .Net apps are almost as simple to clob together as our trusty old VFP apps.

But not quite.

Managed code applications are a real bear to deploy. The amount of times I have heard "it works on my machine" from a developer versus the supposed worry-free builds I have been given that bombed or required special handling has skyrocketed. Simply put, .Net apps don't deploy well in an "install and forget" environment.

VFP apps won't run devices; neither will they work best in a widely distributive environment. But they work great for desktop database apps and nothing, nothing in the .Net world comes close to meeting that.

Perhaps if MS had stuck with WinFS and put local data storage integral to the operating system with programking support I couldn't make these claims. But they didn't.

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