On 8 Mag, 22:40, dlzc <dl...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On May 8, 12:55=A0pm, hfu...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
>
> Presumably then you have seen (x)Harbour, but did not consider it
> since it does not do .NET?
>
> David A. Smith
Just to clarify...
I gave a try to FlagShip down around 2000? 2001? - can't remeber
exactly - then to harbour and to xHarbour (I'm on their mailing list),
I wrote some commercial apps with Alaska xBase++ (subscriber since
beginning), I tried Recital xBase (www.recital.com), I made lot of
stuff with dBase Plus (www.dbase.com), I bought FoxPro 9 and just left
it on the shelf, tried AFP (Active Foc Pages) and WinASP
(www.htcsoft.cl/winasp.htm ) not to mention Microsoft stuff.
While my old Clipper apps were still providing cash flow, all my
attempts generated only time waste.
I did some good job converting from Clipper to xBase++ (year 2001) and
the results were catchy, but developing from scratch proved to be non-
profitable. Too complicated compared to modern tools with IDE - too
heavy to maintain: the final product was also missing too many
features that nowaday everyone take for granted (reports, automatic
updates,ecc) and was clearly overpriced (because of heavy developing
costs) despite the minimal profit margin I carried on it.
A failure.
In the meantime old Clipper apps were still payng bills: I started
some proofing with dBase2k, but was the release of Dbase Plus 2.21
that changed the scene: I made lot of intresting stuff for internal
use of my largest customer and finally I found something that could
cope with Clipper. I'm still using it, BTW.
Anyway time passes, and Borland BDE was said to have no future. I
started to look over.
Year 2005 I finally phased-out my Clipper workhorse - with complaints
of some die-hard customer - because supporting it was too costly
compared with the revenues. Installed base was shrinked down to 3
(small) customers only. That time was dBase to pay bills, but with
different business model: no more commercial applications, lot of
consulting instead.
I ended up writing LOT of small utilities for a bunch of very large
customers, doing what the big guys were too lazy to do. Painful, but
profitably.
In the meantime I shifted from my 40s to 50s, lot of things changed in
the outside world, and the market for character-based applications
shrinked down to nothing (at least here in Italy) and very few around
still remeber of Clipper.
At one time I also bought Visual Studio 6 (and somewhere I also have
the VB.NET version), but there is nothing to do: I write procedural
clipper code at lightning speed (with support of my vaste libraries od
UDFs) - all other progamming solutions I found are not fitted for me.
Too young to retire, but too old to brain-wash myself with those
daunting developing platforms of today, I'm still missing Clipper.
Now I'm using DBMaxy at work (consulting is my primary font of
revenues) and started with DBFree at home (and I'm glad with both -
they do a good job on the web) but there are occasions when I 'd need
something running on client: that's why I thougt about .NET
I've never been able to do anything with it, but I still didn't give
up.
Cheers
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