Ken,

Over the last couple of years, I've given some thought to how I would handle interop with or migration to .NET for my applications if necessary. These are the main ideas/concerns that come to mind:

Reports, Reports, Reports
When people talk about interop, reporting doesn't get a lot of attention. I have close to 200 reports, and rewriting them in Crystal Reports or SQL Reporting Services would be a major undertaking. I imagine a lot of people are in the same boat. Sure, we have methods for reporting in web apps, but if you want to preview VFP reports from a WinForm or Avalon app, there is no clear way to handle it. One possibility would be to simply pop up the VFP preview form from an external EXE, but that may not provide a seamless experience, especially in an Avalaon app. It is possible to display the report preview surface on a .NET WinForm, so you may want to consider creating native WinForm and/or Avalon preview windows.

Web Service Standards
As Web Service standards evolve going forward, one thing I worry about is that the SOAP Toolkit won't cut it on the client or the server. Perhaps integration with Indigo will address this concern?

COM Debugging and VS.NET Integration
Of course, when you think about interop, COM Debugging is high on everyone's list, and I imagine it is high on yours as well. I would guess that you're also thinking about bringing back the other VS.NET integration tools that were pulled from VFP 7 when it was taken out of "the box".

Interact with DataSets
This one may already be possible, but I'm not sure. Common practice for passing DataSets back and forth between .NET and VFP seems to be to convert them to XML, then deal with them as cursors inside VFP. I'm sure this is the most efficient way of handling it in many cases, but it may be useful to deal directly with the DataSet object through interop. For example, a third-party application may pass or expect native DataSets, and being able to deal with these in VFP would be important. This may apply to other complex .NET objects as well.

That's all I can think of for now. I'm not looking for answers, but I wanted to get my thoughts to the team. If this is the wrong place to put them, please direct me to the right one <g>.

Thanks.