>Yeah, I think it's real value will be in helping people move an existing VFP app. into .NET w/o a full rewrite, not so much as a standalone language. Unfortunately, I think the level of compatibility they need to have to make this possible is going to be difficult for them to achieve. So far their effort seems to be all over the board - they appear to jump from one piece of the project to another (I'm guessing based on whatever interests them the most). But (to me) they're in a bit of a bind - it's an all or nothing thing. Even 80% compatibilty means most people won't even consider using it (or they look at it, realize that even at 80% they still need to make a huge number of changes to get things working and pass on the idea).
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>As a standalone language I think it's interesting - in the same way something like IronPython is interesting. I might look at it but I honestly wouldn't spend a huge amount of time learning it because there just aren't that many people using it.

You are certainly right about the compatibility issue, as well as the somewhat haphazard approach to this whole project by eTecnologia. Having said that, the part that holds the most promise, however, is the fact that you can use the tool to build the tool -- that's quite a hat trick. So, if you are missing some functions, you can write the functions using the functions and commands that already exist. This part, I think, holds most promise as an open source model of sorts. If (and it is a sizeable if) people jump into the bandwagon and start writing code to complete the missing features (at least as far as built-in functionality is concerned), the system could quickly approach 100% compatibility as far as the core language is concerned. Writing commands is tougher, of course, and writing SET() -functions and other things that need to be low-level is even tougher.

This project has been under construction for a long time already, and it has produced some very impressive functionality and many frustrating dead-ends. The underlying technology has changed at least once that I know of, which has probably slowed down the progress even more. As the VFP community is shuffling off to various directions, time is running out (or may already have run out) for a replacement system, which is really too bad. But as Darwin would say, in order to survive we must adapt to change, and luckily for our species we are able to adapt more than any other species, because we can learn new things quickly and try new approaches in a controlled way without the usual multi-generational lag.

And by the way, eTecnologia IS implementing WPF and Silverlight into their framework system as we speak.