Hi Jim,

<< Perhaps it looks like a vendetta, and maybe even that's what it is! >>

It seems to be the theme of every posting you make, whether or not the thread has anything to do with that subject or not, so yes, I would call it a "vendetta." I'm glad you don't take offense to that.

<< But I am having a really really hard time UNDERSTANDING how this "vision" is good for me or good for VFP. >>

Well, I think you have some very valid points regarding the feasibility of this approach, but if it works it should be good for you and VFP because it expands the possibilities of what you're able to do and what VFP is able to do. It also increases the likelihood of VFP continuing to be a player in VS and therefore standalone as well. If MS didn't see VFP fitting into this picture somewhere than VFP would be in a lot more trouble than most perceive it to be in now.

<< KISS (keep it simple, stupid) is a principle which I still believe in. I happen to beileve that it is even MORE important as more and more applications are delivered which are "production" in nature - the company DEPENDS on it to run its business. >>

Actually, KISS is sort of the underlying principle behind all of this COM, DCOM, ActiveX stuff. What's simpler than saying use each product for what it was intended to do and let it talk to the others to do what it can't do?

<< I have a very simple setup here (2 systems) and I cannot get proper results from an all MS product (WORD 97) running on a all MS (WIN95) OS with only a video card and printer driver being sourced elsewhere and *no* fancy extensions in my system. Word comes close, but don't work right in a certain circumstance (and there is no evident way around it). >>

The general quality and stability of all of the MS products is also a real issue with me. I think as a company they've demonstrated far too much willingness to let bugs go in favor of making a ship date. Depending on a number of products to work together when all of the products have perhaps more than their fair share of bugs is a serious problem. I've already been burnt by it myself. As a 3rd party vendor I don't appreciate spending one second of my development time to work around bugs in their products so I can ship mine. I'm not expecting perfection, but as an example, VFP 3.0 should never have shipped until it was what's now 3.0b IMO.

<< Now MS would have me deliver production apps using SQL Server and ADO and assorted other what-nots and wherefores across many (possibly hundreds) of workstations? It looks to me like its hard enough to get a all VFP app running properly in today's environment, not to add the complexity of these additional things. >>

Actually, no they wouldn't have you do that. They'd have you right the whole front-end in HTML/DHTML and have the server(s) store the actual application, data and assorter other what-nots. IOW, there is no delivery and all of the components used by the application can reside in a tightly controlled environment. Right now I think the degree of difficulty required to develop applications of that type is too high, but it is getting easier. (I also kind of wonder if Symantec's dbAnyWhere is in the lead here.)

There's another side to that coin too. The more a product does, the more potential for bugs there are within that product and for problems with that product. Look at VFP it does a lot and carries a lot of legacy code from its long history. (Actually, in thinking about it, I think it's safe to say that VFP has the most native capabilities of all the products in VS.) It also has a fair # of bugs. As I've mentioned here before, I suspect that a lot of VFP's ActiveX problems are related to this. It also seems that the more VFP's (and any other product's) capabilities expand the more bugs it gets. If I recall, when I worked at Fox there were somewhere around 2000 bugs in the known bugs list for FoxBase+ 2.10. Many of them so obscure I can't imagine how people possibly found them. FoxBase+ was viewed as a very stable product and I totally agree with that categorization. I would guess that VFP 5.0 had easily 10,000 bugs in it when it shipped and that probably half that number exist in 5.0a. I still wouldn't call VFP 5.0 buggy, but of the bugs that exist I would guess that 90% of them are in features new since FPW.

IMO, a bunch of small products or controls, that did exactly what they were supposed to do and nothing else that all operated together correctly would be a dream world. Are we there yet? No! Is what we have now workable? For the most part, I think yes. Will it get better? I certainly hope so!

From a VFP standpoint, I think it comes down to this basic question will VFP become a better development tool if it's approached as a monolithic solution that encompasses all of the needs one could possibly imagine for a database tool or will it become a better tool if it is able to effectively operate in an an environment filled with other tools that will help it do its job that it can work with seemlessly? Obviously, IMO, the answer is the latter. By no means does that mean I want VFP specific enhancements to stop, but to me it does mean that the most important areas to work on in VFP - in no particular order - are ActiveX Support, MTS Support and ADO support. I don't really care about a native VFP object oriented menu system or report writer and things of that nature I just want VFP to play nice with everything else that's already available and more importantly to play nice with everything else that will be available.

FWIW, since the bulk of my personal income comes from the sales of a VFP specific 3rd party tool, this might not make a helluva lotta sense from a personal standpoint, but I honestly think that as VFP's abilities to play nice with the other tools increases the likelihood of new people coming to VFP also increases. We're actually seeing a lot of customers where VFP 5.0 is their first version of "xBase" ever. Of these people the vast majority of them own Visual Studio and are using VFP to develop client-server applications and they ask how VFP fits with n-tier development and that kind of stuff.

<< So I believe very strongly that this "vision" will burn us badly in the end. I believe that my fears are well-founded. I equally believe that most who purport to support the "vision" do so primarily on faith and very little more. Faith which, though highly commendable, is misplaced in my humble opinion. >>

Well, you might be right. I would really love to see a serious competitor with deep pockets and an absolute focus on quality come into the picture, because I think that would change things dramatically. The underlying theme that I get from your message is that an all Microsoft DP world is a scary concept and with that I agree. OTOH, the world of components does really open the possibilities for other players.