I think that it's fairly clear - they want us to all move to .NET.

They've been struggling to get a .NET community going anywhere near the strength of this one. Imagine a portion of this community eventually fighting as hard for .NET as we do for VFP.

They need the VFP development guys to be working on .NET. They are CLEVER cookies. They don't want them to be distracted from .NET doing VFP development.

I think that all of that's been out there to see for a few years now.

>Randy,
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>That was a really thoughtful and informative message. You know, I am still waiting for a reaction with regard to the reasons by Alan Griver. See: Re: For what reasons? Thread #1204097 Message #1204251
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>I notice that you felt surprise that some of us were kind of perplex about the news. I'm referring to this piece of your message.
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>For me, this past week’s announcement was really just old news that many of us folks in the Fox community already knew. As I have not been that in-tuned with everything Fox over the past year, I was a bit surprised at the reactions. Many of us just assumed that the VFP Roadmap posted after shipping VFP9 had disclosed much of this information. I guess anytime Microsoft makes some sort of public announcement, one can expect all sorts of reactions. And while this news may not be what many VFP developers were hoping for, I must say that Microsoft has been fairly honest about the future of Visual FoxPro for a while now. I don’t think any of the VFP MVPs at last week’s summit were stunned by the news.
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>In all past years, whenever there was a rumor, or somebody who saw a sign on the wall, there have been requests, to the responsible contactperson of that moment, to shed light on the matter. And each and every time the rumors have not been officially confirmed. On the contrary, every time words were used that suggested otherwise. Now, what should we, those who have no personal ("Can you keep a secret? Between you and me...") contacts with the MS devteam members, have believed? Can we be blamed for having believed the official statements?
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>I understand there was a logic behind those official statements. They were also meant to protect ... us, the developers, against corporate decision makers who would immediately decide to drop all VFP work the moment such a rumor was confirmed. But isn't that exactly what is now happening afterall?
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>Someone here has suggested that the news should have been postponed to a phase that we, the developers, had a far better opportunity to change ships. That may be the case after Sedna (so the news might have been postponed to later this year), but else it might have been a nice target for version 10. One, I fear too small, company (ETecnologia) is currently claiming it can convert VFP code into IL code for the CLR platform. Such an undertaking might have been a rewarding job for the VFP team and it would have given us all the opportunity to smoothly change or hook up ships.
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>But I guess there were also other reasons that forced Alan to stop development exactly now. I hope to get his reply one of these days. We need more insight. I sent him a private message. The last paragraph was: Think of my request as one done by a journalist. What would the spokesman of MS say to a journalist in an interview, when asked for what reasons development of Visual FoxPro was stopped. And let's assume that the journalist is not a Microsoft-basher.
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>Hopefully, this explanation makes the reaction of some here now less of a surprise to you.