> If that so, what will say and do in that conference, to PROPHESY that VFP will not last long which is contrary to the promises of MS. I think you are not the perfect person to be invited in that conference because you will only scatter poisonous words which are inappropriate for VFPers.

Jess, I'm speaking on the Do's & Don'ts of framework design - something I am extremely qualified to speak about. (It's also a topic that is equally applicable to many other platforms.) I'm not speaking on the future of VFP. I think you are really out of line making these kinds of suggestions.

Also, take a look at the rest of the topics. Over 1/2 of them are OO sessions applied to VFP or about using VFP with another product. Why? It's not just a VFP world. It's becoming more and more important that VFP developers are able to take their OO knowledge and apply it inside and outside of VFP. It's also very important that we start to realize that we can create better solutions by making VFP part of the solution, not all of the solution.

I haven't spoken any poisonous words. The only poison here is people that ignore the facts and bury their heads in the sand. I suppose you think it's inappropriate to tell someone who's walking towards the end of a cliff with a blindfold on to stop too.

As I have said before, I'm currently doing all of my development in VFP. I will continue to use VFP as long as it exists. We're working on a release of VFE for Tahoe right now. We've rewrote almost the entire interface and invested quite a bit in redesign & development of the framework. I wouldn't be making this investment if I didn't think it was worthwhile to develop in VFP. We've also done a lot to our Tahoe version to make it fit into VS. IOW, while you'll be able to use it to create traditional monolythic applications, we've also done a lot to make it useful in creating very robust middle tier components and made that data handling mechanisms extremely similar to ADO. Why? Because right now there are still a lot of good reasons to develop monolythic apps in VFP. There are also a lot of good reasons to develop middle tier components in VFP and we want to support that as well. The ADO syntax will make it easy for people to talk to a VFP/VFE middle tier for a non-VFP developer doing the front-end. At the same time, we're also trying to provide our customers with a migration path for when VFP does go away and much of the framework design is based on that need.

Based on the time table I've guestimated, VFP still has at least 4 years of life left into it and will probably still be a viable development tool for the next 6 years or so. That's a long time in the DP world. Middle tier components may even have a longer life that that.

> If, optimistically speaking, VFP continue to be around fighting and competing in the arena until the time you have said it should not be, shall we label you 'FALSE PROPHET'!!!

Call me what you want, but when the time comes and I'm prepared for it and I have helped my customers prepare for it, we'll be making money while you're left whining in the dust.