>>>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.
>>
>>As JimN said (and I felt it too - remember how the M$ guys hijacked a Fox user group somewhere in Canada and all of a sudden it was supposed to be a .net group with all the giveaways), they can't build a community. Ballmer can do his dance all day long if he wants, but developers aren't just flies to gather arround any... sugar cube. They pick the one they like.
>>
>>>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.
>>
>>I figure VFP was for a long time the main reason I had Windows on my machines. Still is.
>>
>>Once, during a job interview, I was asked about three strong and three week points in VFP. Don't remember exactly which one I picked for strong, but for weak I picked database vulnerability... and don't remember what were the other two. They should have been: Microsoft and Windows.
>>
>>Microsoft has bought Fox to spite Borland, then to milk it for technology, then eventually killed it for the meat - the ingenious team which did these miracles, they need these guys to fix up their mastodon project. Now they're still trying to lure all the fox's friends to buy into that project.
>>
>>I may eventually buy into that, if I have to, with the same pleasure that I had when I was doing Cobol. Before it comes to that, I plan to stay with Fox as long as I can.
>
>
>I don't agree that Microsoft bought Fox to spite Borland. It seems like a long time ago now but they were genuinely in a battle to be the #1 development tools vendor. And I don't think Fox could have advanced FoxPro the way Microsoft did. If you look at VFP 9 compared to FoxPro 2.5, they took it light years forward.

On the other hand, Fox Software had plans - published, no less - for future developments. The only one that sticks is a "client-server version". Data Base Advisor used to track their various projects' progress regularly.
So who knows. I'm not disappointd at all with the path Microsoft took (to VFP) but it is a shame of the first order that they STILL don't see that DATA is what businesses buy computers to process.