My personal opinion is that this little tool has a bright future and essentially, it's just a couple of extra DLLs that you bundle with your application.

So what does this mean for Fox? From what I can see, VFP people are pragmatic and have only circled wagons because so much of what has been said out there is demonstrably wrong. Even the white paper for SQL 2005 Compact contains this little gem:

"Access and FoxPro, being part of Microsoft Office, are examples of products that have integrated database engines that work well within their context but were never fully integrated into the Visual Studio development environment, as they weren’t considered general purpose data storage engines."

Oh, was that why? I thought it was because the Fox community asked for VFP not to be included in dotNET because they didn't want to lose their data handling features ;-)

Whatever, it's a smart move by MS that may well see more Fox people swelling the ranks of the converted. I'm presupposing that performance is OK and that it integrates cleanly so you don't end up with gigantic code towers to replicate something you'd do in a few lines of code with an indexed cursor and a temporary table.