The only features to the core VFP product (EXE/DLL) that we will probably be enhancing are in the goals of Sedna itself, as in interoperability. Things like enhancing the XMLAdapter for ADO.NET compatibility, UI issues to run on Longhorn properly, etc. The bulk of Sedna will be new add-on DLLs, Xbase components, .NET Framework wrapper components, etc.

There is some big news coming from Microsoft tomorrow about XML document formats for Office (not just the next version). This will have a big impact on VFP, allowing VFP to work better with Office documents especially Word and Excel. We do have buckets (so to speak) of areas we plan to focus on, and the result will be significant. But that does exclude other areas of the core product.

What will most likely happen is that in 2-5 years, many VFP developers will realize that things in Sedna are critical to their VFP related application development in moving forward with technology (similar to the days of moving from DOS to Windows or FoxPro 2.x to VFP, etc).

So where we are is, we have a well defined and firm outline of the scope of what we will be doing to enhance VFP, including the when and how. We do not have specifications detailed yet and we will be taking at least a year to work on all the various interoperability type functionality features that relate to the .NET Framework 2.0, Office, VS 2005, SQL Server 2005 (and Express), Longhorn, Avalon, Indigo, etc. etc.

I will work on creating details in the monthly letters and elsewhere which list out what buckets we are scoping (in more detail), where we are, and what type of feedback we need, etc. For Sedna, we plan to use the VFP community as an extension of the VFP team more than ever before.