Hi Ken,

First, thank you for the invaluable input you have brought to the VFP community along all those past years.

As a few of us reading this VERY interesting thread, I can feel and even smell a slight change in the semantics concerning VFP here. Being of blooooody Gallic origin with a restricted command of English, that's all I can say at this stage. Sorry if some of my words below are a bit sour. They are not intended so.

We (VFP developpers) have felt and are still feeling the strong MS corporate pressure to move our application base and new developments to .NET. Of course!

>[...]You don't have to move away from VFP to use .NET.
>What Microsoft has been doing is encouraging VFP developers to learn .NET,
>mainly by showing how VFP can be used with .NET (same as SQL Server is a
>good relational database for use with VFP). Not sure how I can be more
>clear about this.

You can't:)

I belong to those who have kept VFP as a cursor and presention engine whilst moving all their DB stuff to SQL engines. What you're saying here is definitely clearer and may be an additional reason to continue working with MS dev tools.

One question here. Why is MS so conservative with their office tool users (which have been kept functional for over decades now) and so tough with their developper base with drastic changes in the programming interfaces and models?

From changes in the MS Access development models to the ditching of "good old VB6", not forgetting the vagaries around programmatic data access, I have the feeling that part of the current irritation within the business application developper community is directly fed by MS themselves.

Francois