Good and bad. Like everything else, I guess.

I was one of the first people to bring VFP into corporations and write books about it and publish dev standards. Incredibly blessed to be part of this community - met most of my best friends here, got to work with Ken and Paul on VFP3 as vendors, got to work with the team the past few years.

I feel very proud of how hard everyone has worked on the product. I feel proud of how even newcomers like Milind got into the community (favorite quote "when I don't have the monthly letter up on time, I get emails asking if my back went out again. They are amazing").

I'm amazed at what the community has done to work with us on the product. Localization, helping each other, Codeplex stuff, etc. I'm happy that this will continue.

I'm sad that this moment has come, but I'm glad that I was here to make sure it was handled as well as it could be. I'm proud that there was never a question that we would openly stand up and share the decision when it was final and participate in these conversations. I'm glad that I could tell the MVPs in person. I'm glad that I could spend the time to read well over 500 messages and counting (between here, other forums, newsgroups, my email).

I am humbled by the reaction of some of my friends from over the years (ex-Flashers, folks I haven't talked to for years) who immediately asked me "are you ok?" (and now I'm starting to tear up). I'm amazed at the number of folks on the VB.NET team and their community who've asked me the same thing. I also was humbled that when I offered to not do the keynote in Prague, in favor of someone who is leading the VFPX project, Igor wouldn't hear of it. He made me feel welcome at a time that I was worred what the reaction would be. Till then I thought that I could lose many of my friends because I made the decision to be the one to announce this. (tears are coming down now - and I'm hoping none of the MVPs around me notice).

I've been surprised that I have only gotten a few messages along the lines of "I wonder how you can sleep at night, knowing the thousands of devs who are losing their jobs this week". I've been happy that when I responded to these, talking about the decision, Codeplex, pointing to blog entries, etc., that I've always gotten apologies from the people within a few emails.

So in short, like Doug Dodge would say, I feel blessed.

yag

>So Alan, How does it feel to be the one to have to stand up and tell everyone the King is Dead?<g> or should that be a <s>