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>>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.
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>I never understood the rational behind people wanting VFP to be just a standalone tool.
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>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?

Because we were presented with a choice between losing local db engine (i.e. Fox wouldn't be Fox anymore) and waiting for other tools to be released all together, or keeping the engine and having new releases more often than the rest of VS - which was true for VFP7. It came out months before the edition of VS which was in the works at the time.