Hi Mike --

>>
> A future? (Sorry, old habits die hard. ;-)

Actually, it seems that a lot of the VB community is concerned about their future as well, though not to the extent you'll see here in the Fox world.
<<

Nor for the same reasons. You're absolutely right, though. Those of us with long histories in the language are being cast aside, as MS tries to make something any secretary or MBA can "program" in. I know I'm not going to see what I want in the language anytime soon, and am more than likely transitioning to a combination that involves more ATL and PowerBasic.

>>What features that are in VFP that are not in VB, for example, inheritance, robust data and string manipulation functions, native database access, macro substitution and a more extensible and more easily manipulated (programmatically) IDE would you most like to see in VB?<<

Ummm... Well, none of those really turn me on all that much. VB has very robust data/string manipulation -- how do you feel it's any stronger in VFP? Native database access? We got scads of 'em. <g> Macro substitution is something I'd not want to see, as I feel it encourages sloppy code that's hard to read -- gave it up myself back with dBase IV. Also, the extensibility model in the VB IDE is pretty robust, but it's not something I use much anyway, so not something I'd waste energy on.

What I really want to see is native access to all the new interfaces springing up like clover throughout Windows. There should be no need to run off building typelibs for this stuff, for goodness sake. And speaking of which, VB needs support for the data types being used by the new interfaces, like positive H_RESULTs. VB also needs a better threading model -- one in which I can dispatch a thread without resorting to using an axEXE.

These are the sorts of improvements that are unlikely to make it into VB, and the reason so many are jumping to VC or VJ. The list you had was, pardon if this sounds arrogant as it's not meant to, covered long ago for VB users.

>>Do you think changing/extending VB's containership model to be more like VFP's would be beneficial or do you think it just encourages developers to break encapsulation more?<<

It's not something I'd advocate, but I probably wouldn't get bent out of shape over it either. I appreciate encapsulation, and doubt my style would change much.

Later... Karl