>>
>>Some people I respect argued that VFP should not be part of .NET. Their argument won out. In retrospect I consider the developer-driven decision to bail out of VS to be the fatally wrong decision.
>
>I never understood the rational behind people wanting VFP to be just a standalone tool.

The rational at the time was that we'd get faster updates if it was a separate product. Do note that if VFP was still in Visual Studio, we'd currently probably only have equivalent to VFP8/SP1 at this point in time. Now, who knows if that would truly be the case or not, but we wouldn't have had as many versions or service packs (ie: fixes) along the way as we've had, that's for sure. I personally wouldn't have wanted to live with the problems with VFP7 and VFP 8 that long.

>
>If it was the flagship tool of a company (other than Microsoft) that would obviously make sense, but when Microsoft is pushing EVERYONE to Visual Studio, why not keep VFP in it?
>
>Makes no difference now, though.

Hindsight is 20/20, and even then may not be correct.