For years a power-user could write a simple foxpro app and it would run. These apps ran into problems overtime though and the data was accessible using excel (wide-open). It gave VFP a bad rep.

I am sure the SQL/ADO?NET dispensers at MS chime in glee when they see we've taken the bait. The truth is a power USER can rip off SQL data to. Fortunately (or unfortunately) there are very few power users anymore. The dumbdown is almost complete! And even when they were real power users - and even though I have heard that story a zillion times - I have never seen anyone or heard reports or been given names of anyone doing anything malicious to a DBF (except for pretenders calling themselves developers and needed an excuse to divert the user's eyes from an ugly project).

Have you?

It's a phony WMD scare tactic to make sure NA's forget ethics and common sense for the cause of an easy M$ bottom line and the geek-o-rama vaudvillian seminar schills that move from one development platform to the next at the drop of a shrimp shell in Redmond. There are some guys here that have been experts on every new next great offer out of Redmond. But they are not necessarily experts at developing solutions. In fact a bunch probably just write books and do seminars. It has probably been a long time since they actually went out in the field and solved a real software problem.

Lets see from dbase - to fox - to VB - back to fox - to html - to ASP - back to fox - to net.

All this movement has frozen their design skills (cultural professional lag). Their projects in (insert their last seminar presentation language here) are [probably] not that much better than their dBase III projects from 20 years ago. IOW - New languanges "expertise" does not neccessiarily translate to better solution design. Throwing a grid out in dBase aint any different than throwing a grid out in NET. Same solution approach - just a new shrinkwrap.