One of my clients recently asked me this question. My assumption was that they had a concern that Microsoft had no future plans for Visual FoxPro and would stop supporting the latest (and last!) version in 2015. I prepared my arguments that the software we were running with should continue to run without problems for at least 10 years beyond that and pointed out that we had never called on Microsoft for support in the 15+ years we had been developing the application.
An additional argument for staying with Visual FoxPro now was that if we switched to some other programming language, it too might also be obsolete when a move from Visual FoxPro was mandatory. There was certainly no interest in rewriting the system twice in the coming decades!
Further discussion revealed that part of the concern was with data sharing in the organization. The Visual FoxPro data is all housed in a server at one location where most of the manipulation and reporting is performed. A couple of locations remote to this server access it for simple queries. Wouldn’t we have to rewrite the system if we wanted to centralize the data — using SQL Server or some other database system?
This turns out to be one area where Visual FoxPro has much flexibility. It does not have to rely on the native FoxPro data layout. It can access SQL Server (and many other types of data) just as well. Although it would be more complicated than converting the data and throwing a switch, it would be much more economical than a complete system rewrite and could be staged, moving parts of the data to the shared environment as it became desirable to share that particular data. Additionally, it would be possible to replicate the data to be shared and keep all the existing processes unchanged.
The bottom line is that Visual FoxPro continues to be a viable development solution for a wide variety of applications. I certainly recommend continuing to use it in existing applications and would not totally dismiss using it for new applications.