A company like yours not thinking strategically about the future sooner or later pays a high price. It sounds harsh and unfair, since you lost a life and not just a legacy computer, but we also can't do such amount of work just out of mere empathy for your situation.
From the latest experience I had, a software retailer company lost its developer of its main POS system and wasn't and isn't used to planning a change of the software with a consultant developer. I won't get into details, but they would be far better off with a new employee and I really think of such a step for your situation, no matter if your former boss only developed this software in spare times or as main task.
Just maintaining a software now is a job for someone already knowing FoxPro at least, you can't take both hurdles of not knowing programming and Foxpro at all, and also not knowing the inner workings of the software you're taking into maintenance, even if you have the advantage of knowing your business, that's not much of help, it's easier to expain your business to a developer than to learn programming, Foxpro and this software architechture and you certainly underestimate how long it even takes an expeerienced devleoper to even just read and understand someone else's code. At least one thing is for sure: As long as you don't have known bugs and no matter how good or poor the software is written, it is a reference and model of your business rules in itself.
But this is not just like taking over a restaurant in a certain spirit and kitchen with well known ingredients and recipes, every developer cooks its own soup and as you say your boss was the original developer, unless your company is a software vendor company I seldom see a boss of any other type of busiiness doing development as the main job, so software was developed as a side task, I guess. It's prejudice, but unfortunately that type of prejudice mainly turning out true, that this is not the best base to continue.
If your company hasn't reserves to cover such a risc having become a real case, this very well can end your business. What's certainly not working is tryig to cover up the loss with forum questions. If you need to be able to cover up changing rules or even laws and keep up with capabilities of competition, you need to have someone getting to know the software, if it is your major "asset" and unique selling proposition. And alone that, not even talking of changing the software, just understanding it, can take a long time alone.
If the situation is less alarming you might consider replacing the software overall. That also takes time, but the major concern then will be about the data, ie to move that to something like SQL Server and still keep things going. With data moved to a database server, you have a larger base of developers to choos from as either employees or consultants, who can contribute in developing a frontend for that backend.
Even with your concrete problem, you should not only think about extending VFP code, your goal is to import XML into your data, you find lots of C/C++/C#,Java,Database Developers, even Javascript, who will be able to turn XML into data and then to read that into DBF is less of a problem. So don't only try to find your salvation here. You're too stuck on details.
Bye, Olaf.
