Pertti,

GREAT analogy with the 500 lbs gorilla that doesn't know how to eat bananas. That's precisely right. I don't think data interaction was a high priority in the infancy of .Net. Data as a whole has generally been something you connect to tentatively and not natively to all MS products.

There are some former VFP gurus who took to bad-mouthing the product in comparison to .Net....I only needed one comeback - "ad-hoc three table joins"


>John,
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>So, I guess I should take this as one ex-insider's confirmation of Randy's comments regarding the value of "the VFP community" to MS.
>
>But first...
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>>>Most interesting to me is your take on why MS won't license the VFP core code to some other company, which could run with it and make life easier in the future for a lot of people with existing VFP apps. This very non-licensing question has puzzled me over the last few days, because I honestly can't imagine that VFP would be the kind of Gold Mine of Great Code that it is portrayed to be in many other messages here. It seems to me that some of the greatest technologies in VFP, such as Rushmore and local cursors, have already been lifted (or at least studied and emulated) from VFP, and already have or are currently being incorported in the next .NET version. Not much amazing, cutting edge whizbang technology left in the ole Fox, I bet. Most of the technology that is in there works very well in concert with the other technologies under the same roof, but I imagine it would be pretty useless and even difficult to lift it out of there and integrate it into .NET...
>>>
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>>Wrong. There is a lot of very innovative code in VFP. Amazingly so. .Net is trying to integrate ideas, not code.
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>Hmmm.... I believe that Yag himself said in one post here that the core code is pretty horrific C++ stuff, and hence almost impossible for an open source consortium (for example) to take over and develop further. (By horrific I mean super-complex -- and brilliant -- bytesoup that has been spiced by a number of cooks over many, many years) I can imagine that, oh yes I can! VFP has a lot of great ideas though, definitely, and they work well in VFP to boot, so I suppose many of these ideas are easily "liftable and transferrable". However, great **ideas** embedded into the product by themselves shouldn't really keep MS from licensing the code itself to a Good Fairy or a Crazy Uncle wiling to take it on. Anyone just simply USING VFP can see what great ideas there are throughout the product and how they work without reading a line of the underlying code. IOW, there really is no sense trying to keep people from observing the workings of a great city by hiding the gnarly infrastructure
>the city is built upon.
>
>Digression: What has really, really bugged me for a long time about .NET is the data immaturity (as opposed to VFP's data centricity). I was an "early adopter" of .NET, and eventually I bought Kevin's MM.NET framework and then Strataframe, and only after having those frameworks wrap the ugly databinding mess to a nice and easy interface I was FINALLY able to do 2-way databindings (doublebindings?) without a 3-way pain. Originally I seriously thought that I had missed entire sections of the manual or that I didn't understand something very crucial about the workings of .NET. Eventually it dawned on me,though, that this 500 pound gorilla really and truly didn't know how to eat bananas! It could arrange and display them ok, but it couldn't consume them... How it is still alive on that kind of "see-food" diet, one can only wonder... In the meanwhile my new and old VFP apps devastaded entire banana plantations in a heartbeat, like some Looney Toons' Tasmanian Devils.
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>>
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>>>So, you are thinking that the very reason why MS doesn't want to license the VFP core code to another company is the fear of losing the very community that would most benefit from this move. This sure seems like circular, incestuous and (dare I say) evil logic to me. I'm not saying that your statement is false, I'm just saying that if it is true, it would be very, very weird indeed (in my book, at least.)
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>>No, it is correct on a lot of levels. Randy is privy to a lot of the inside discussions and such that validates his point. I was also in a lot of those discussions. Unfortunately, a lot of that is covered by NDAs.
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>You know, regardless, this whole concept to me is still very, very weird indeed... I think MS had better make sure to keep those NDAs in force for some time to come, because if this is substantiated from many sources, there goes MS's best hope of having an energetic & happy VFP community move over to .NET. Instead, they will get a bunch of grumpy and alienated people in their hands.
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>If I'm building sandboxes for living and the sole-provider Hammer Company stops providing replacement hammers in order to sell me their megamallet as soon as my little hammer , AND ask me to be happy about it, I, too, would become grumpy in a hurry.
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>As they say in Jersey: For-GETaboutit!
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>
>Pertti