>>>>Do you consider xBase any less dead (to most people) than Visual FoxPro?
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>>>>I guess that's not the point. The product seems aimed at those who want to continue writing in FoxPro, just with a .NET target. IMO it doesn't really matter what other developers think.
>>>
>>>Maybe it should be more generic in terms. Because it is data-centric, how about Data.Net?
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>>.NET already has a data solution, ADO.NET. With SQL Server as the preferred DBMS.
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>And it works very well. And .NET frameworks that use strong-typed business objects can certainly manipulate data as easily as VFP. I can fill 15 cursors with data on one trip to the server with one SP call, then handle those local cursors as I would queried remote views in VFP. I can filter, sort, fill cursors by parent pk, scan, do queries against temporary cursors in to other temporary cursors. And I can serialize snapshots of business objects - including the entire state of their data - with a single command, store them if I like and deserialize them if I need them.
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>My only beef with .NET at this point is I miss some of the wonderful RAD stuff Mike and Toni made available to us in VFE and I am still adjusting to not having DBCX. A lot of the data handling power in Strataframe (and I would expect MM and probably a lot of frameworks created by others) comes from extending the .NET framework with datacentric functions and subroutines to manipulate the data, but that is not exactly rocket-science, just creating classes to do what you want them to do and making them part of the framework. It isn't .NET out of the box, I don't consider VFP out of the box a particularly good development tool either. VFP without a framework is an invitation to writing old prgs. VFP can be awkward and development-time consuming with data too ( assuming a SQL server backend since I gave up DBFs a while ago) but it certainly can be pretty powerful with DBCX driven remote views or skill with the cursorbuilder.
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>If I can ever convince somebody like Toni to apply her gift for RAD tools to Strataframe, there is certainly the potential in the .NET IDE for wizards and builders that could easily lead to develop data-centric apps as fast as I can in VFE.
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>I really want to see the VFP .NET compiler finished, as I'm sure it will be very useful, but I don't think it is necessary in order to have pretty much everything in .net we love in Fox. It will be another useful tool and will save a lot of development time - especially when there is a part of an app that contains a whole lot of convoluted business logic that can be brought over as one nice black-box dll into a .NET app.
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>But for new development, I can't imagine going back to code it in VFP so I can compile it for .NET.

Sorry to reply to such a long and thoughtful post with a one word reply, but: exactly.