Hi, Jim.

I have to confess that your arguments sound to me like the perfect explanation about why there is not much need to go on developing VFP. :)

>First, it's now back to sales where the potential purchaser will say "I heard Microsoft has dropped development of VFP. Why should I get a product with no future?". This time the "dropped" is true!

This announcement hadn't changed that, in my opinion, and really, now you have a counterargument about the product been partially open sourced (you know customer love buzzwords).

>Then there's the continued development of tools that many of us have integrated into VFP. To date we've largely been able to have Word or Excel integrate easily for the users. Now that is over. As Word and Excel progress we cannot offer compatibility any more (users prefer latest file formats and may in fact need them in future).

This is a perfect example about what kind of things the community can handle some stuff much better than Microsoft itself. Since a lot of time, products like XFRX and others had provided a much better integration with Office than what VFP ever natively had. Now, the newer versions of Ofice are even easier to integrate with, iven that all you need is an XML parser and a ZIP library (this is what the new format is all about).

>Ironic that this news comes the day after I started a new job... in a COBOL shop!

Great for you! Think how many people though that COBOL was a dead platform...

Regards,