There is lots of marketing involved, but aside from that, there is a huge adoption of .NET development today and it is increasing rapidly. The future of Microsoft software (operating system, tools, applications, etc) is on the .NET platform. Over half of the VFP developers we've surveyed in the past few years say they plan on using VS/.NET within a few years. The current survey of last month shows that 27% of VFP developers actually use VS.NET as well today. This does not take into the account the former VFP developers who are now full time .NET developers (since the survey was only for those using VFP now).

When Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 release later this year, it will be version 2.0 of .NET and will be considered very mature and in great prime time state for building applications. The title wave of marketing and adoption of VS 2005 coming in the next 12 months will be huge, possibly bigger than the last two versions of VS released combined. That does not mean people can't or won't use VFP next year or even 8 years from now. Remember that I mentioned to you today that our #1 goal for enhancing VFP will be in the area of interop. To expand further, most of efforts of the VFP team will actually be in the area of having VFP work better and be integrated with VS 2005 applications/components as well as adding VFP like data features to .NET programming.