VFP is the best Front end development tool for Desktop development. I have worked on tools like VB, Delphi, C++, Pascal etc., but when it comes to commercial application development I have always found VFP (Visual FoxPro), has an edge above all of them.
In 1998, I had a huge target project, to convert an existing DOS based accounting system to Windows platform, it was a multi module accounting system and had a large customer base. I started development in Delphi as the current DOS system was developed in PASCAL(???) and I thought if I use Delphi (it uses Pascal as its language, it supports Pascal!!!) I will have less conversion issues to face. I developed Nominal ledger module in 4 months time and eventually had to scrap it because of lots of issues, including ODBC, Multi users, Built in functionality not available etc..., infact I remember I had to write custom controls to do every bit of checking, Numeric entry, Date validations etc. Although the current version of Delphi might be supporting all this basic required functionality, Delphi 2.0 did not.
Next, I shifted to Visual Basic 5.0 thinking, VB5 being a popular language will definately support such basic features, it did and we were rolling until it came to VB6. There were a lot of functional, Syntactical changes which forced us to rewrite most of our code!!!!! I had previously worked on FoxPro for DOS and Windows, I never ever had such conversion issues, the only reason I was avoiding it was because of "HYPE" about it not being a good Visual programming language. I did a small test project and found out that it supported all the requirements and conversion to higher versions was literally transparent, and since then it has been VFP all the way. I have successfully designed and developed a bunch of applications using VFP as front end and SQL Server, Oracle, VFP local database, Paradox and now MySQL as Backends. Its just amazing how easy it is to develop and maintain.
I would prefer and suggest VFP as the front end development tool for everyone's Desktop development requirements, its just amazing.
