First let me thank you for all you did for FoxPro over the years.

I began to work with the Fox with version VFP 3.0

I still like it and use it a lot and I know that I'm far from mastering it. But it's just a development tool amongst many different development tools.

I don't really care about development tools. I've learned in school to use the right tool for the job. For many applications (in fact the majority) of applications I had to build over the years VFP was the best tool for those applications.

I'm sure that many other developers would'nt care as much about VFP if .net would have simplify things when dealing with data as much as VFP did.

I, like many others, waited until .net showed us that dealing with data would be closer to the way VFP does it.

After a (too long) period we're just seeing glimpses of how it should've been done from the beginning in .net

LINQ seems promising. Is it really? I really hope so because we (VFP developers) have to move fast because the end of the road (with VFP) is here. Perhaps I'll touch to Sedna but from now on I know that I have to look at another development tool (MS or otherwise).

The signal has been given some years ago by many developers but when comparing how easy we had it with the fox compared to the torture of doing it with .net I guess that I'm not the only one that thought "It makes no sense those guys will wake up and realize the jewel they have in their hands. At worst they will replicate it in .net"

I just hope that LINQ is really the answer.

Perhaps you'll tell me that it's not over yet that there is support until 2015. Let me tell you how I see support for Visual FoxPro. UT

My main support for VFP has always been the UT. Already many VFP developers jumped the fence to go with .net so that meant less support for VFP. There are still many fantastic gurus in VFP over here. Developers that will provide unvaluable help. But with the announced end of new development on the VFP development environment I'm sure some of those developers will evaluate their position and we'll lose some more support over here (ut).

So let me ask you this. How long for quality support on VFP?

I'll leave it at that.

I have to go now I have to shop for the new development environment I'll have to use.

Thanks again YAG!


>Not sure how to answer this. We've said for years that VFP wasn't a strategic product. We said that one reason I owned VS Data was to get the VS team (and particularly VB) understand VFP and vice verse. We said that we were working on LINQ as well as Sedna.
>
>That said, there was no decision to end VFP core enhancements until fairly recently. As part of that discussion, we decided to open source Sedna at no charge. After that decision, the next question was "should we tell folks"? Note that not many companies do that so openly. The team's reaction was "of course we should" and we stuck to that thru a number of discussions. The next question was when and how do we tell people? With the MVP summit coming up, I felt that telling them in person was the right thing to do. So we hurried to get everything in place (and there's a lot to get in place so we can answer questions about support, the MVP program, etc.). Basically, I've been working over 100 hours a week the past few weeks. I give props to my current manager, Sandy, for letting me put aside much of my regular work to focus on this for a few weeks less than a month before we release four products that I've architected to beta.
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>I hope that helps.
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>yag
>
>>Alan,
>>
>>Today I have been reading all (I hope) comments in all threads about MS's announcement to stop development after Sedna.
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>>I have read many arguments of those who 'dislike' that decision and of those who 'accept' it. They have provided me several arguments I can use when talking about this to colleagues and customers. However, the arguments of MS have not become clear to me. Several here have shown interest in those arguments, others have stated that a company has no obligation to provide the real argumentation for their business decisions.
>>
>>In the past, on several occasions, MS representatives here have stated that it is not the habit of MS to tell the community about their long term plans. That was esp. the answer whenever someone asked about the chances of a 10th vfp version. Some developers, customers and decision makers have interpreted such wordings as inclining that no next version would gonna see the daylight. Others came to the opposite conclusion (for instance, me). As it turns out now, the pessimists were the realists after all. Have people like me been fooled for a long time by MS, or has it really been a truly recent decision?
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>>I belong to those who would appreciate a more open explanation of the why of the decision.
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>>Your answer will gonna be vital to my decision to either stay on board, or to abandon this ship as soon as possible. I'm kind of in a shock, really. And if I abandon this ship, it may well be that the next ship isn't one of MS, depending on your answer.