>I have been developing application since the early days of FoxBase Mac. Currently, 20% of my work is VFP, with the balance being Excel/VBA. Recognizing that other options have to be considered in the light of the cessation of VFP development, the following features are important to me:
>
>- Unrestricted distribution of compiled EXEs.
>- No installation is necessary if one has a basic application and the VFP DLLs are in the same folder as the EXE.
>- If the application folder is located on a network drive, many users can use the application simultaneously without having to install ANYTHING on their individual computers.
>
>What other development platforms currently offer these features?


Basically you are asking for web development where all they need is a browser. My choice in this area is ASP.NET (but there are certainly others).

You can use .NET as a Winforms platform and a powerful one at that. It does not yet have FoxPro's powerful data-handling capabilities but it's slowly getting there. As for runtimes, most computers have or will have, the NET runtimes already installed. Else it is a free download from MS so you don't even have to package it if you don't want to.