Hi rick,

Just throwing my 2eurocents in here.

I think, much of peters comments are intepretated in a bit harsh way as I know he does not mean it the way many people are reading it. It indeed mich be a cultural and even a bit personal thingy. Now that being said, if you really read into his message, he basically has a few reasonable questions.

Peter is not alone in suspecting other reasons for discontinuation of VFP. I would guess however that the arguments of not releasing a next version will not going to be public in the near future as those involved are still working for MS.

Personally I suspect that since many VFP team members have been working on VB.NET for some time now, they have became very valuable for the development of it, leaving less room to work on a new VFP version. And of course we know that VFPs internal codebase can't be called modern anymore after 20+ years of programming on it. There are design mistakes, there are difficult problems to solve. We also, as programmers, sometimes decide to start all over from scratch. It really is amazing to see that VFP took it this far. And to be honest MS itself does not understand what the strenghts are (as they did not get it before they started .NET).

Now back to the original point. Peter wants to know the reasoning for stopping the development, making his future decisions. I think he has the right to in asking this. Whether YAG will or can answer that is a different issue. But at least be clear about it. There is no point in beating arround the bush. If you can say, say. If not say so too.



It would also be interesting to see what the alternatives are from a MS POV. VB.NET ?? Hmmm, I'd thought to see a language closer to VFP to make that recommendation:
- Better dynamic typing possibilities (rather than strict typed)
- Better data handling (Possibly with LINQ, though there are doubts)
- An alternative for VFP scripting (EVALUATE(), &-macro, COMPILE and EXECSCRIPT())
- A better way to interactively troubleshoot or manipulate data (Command window)

All in all, they are very different right now.

Maybe it is too early and the .NET platform will provide that in the near future to a reasonable extent. Maybe some other vendors can chime in here.