I appreciate it when they make a profit by offering me something I like, like Excel, a masterpiece of a product.

A useful evolution is also welcome even if it is costly to implement, as was the evolution of Fox from 2.6 on towards 9. Note that old FoxPro code remained useable even if less than ideal.

What I think is totally inconsiderate is to be forced to throw out old code just to play and then being squeezewd and pressured to change, as happened to VB as it went from 6.0 to VB.NET. The darn thing is I think they plan to do this over end over again. Planned obsolesence at its worst.

If MS wants to be appreciated they can offer WPF and many other new and good characteristics but allow WinForms code to continue to play in the same box indefinitely. That would be evolutionary and OK in my book. Hope they do it, but don't really trust them to.

Alex

>I have a few of points...
>
>- Microsoft, like any corporation, has to increase value to the stockholder.
>
>- Products in most industries change and often new products are incompatable with old ones. I have a watch that's over twenty years old that they no longer make parts for.
>
>- WinForms, like VFP forms, are based on GDI, a twenty year old technology that does not work well with current hardware, particularly LCD screens. If anything, it was the hardware technologies that changed and WPF was created so that the UI can keep up.
>
>>Craig,
>>
>>That has always been my beef with VB. After a developer invests many man-years in mastering and developing with a VB version, MS makes his code incompatible with the newer version. It has happened before more than once. It happended big time from VB6 to VB.NET. The VFP team on the other hand, as you know, always made a point of keeping new versions backwardly compatible.
>>
>>I hope that this time, when a developer moves to newer versions of VB that his WinForms code does not become incapable of running. But don't count on it. It is all about preserving MS's revenue stream, I have always thought. They haven't cared particularly about the developer's code that they made incompatible. Make the hampsters keep running while staying in the same place, and all in the name of progress.
>>
>>Sorry, but that is how I see it.
>>
>>Alex