Their window of opportunity for getting VFP developers to convert has certainly passed, and I believe they knew that.

And I think there is still a market out there for a dynamic language that lets you do all the .Net things so easily, and as VFP has always done, let's you subclass so easily (think: visual subclassing) and work with data so easily. Heck, they were able to run Java programs from inside VFP.Net.

If they showed up with a reputable company behind them (to provide assurance against future disappearances), I would turn around in a heartbeat.

Hank

>>Hi All,
>>
>>just an update on where things stand with the eTecnologia effort to create VFP.Net: based on the lack of response from the company, I believe all supporters of the company and their product, including me, are moving on.
>>
>>We have no idea why they stopped (apparently) where they did. They had already achieved things that the Dynamic Language Team at MS is just achieving (specifically, the ability to return .Net types, and with that the ability to use decorator attributes -- without which, it is impossible to use WCF directly inside a dynamic language -- this is available now in IP, but won't be released as a supported module until the next release, while VFP.Net had an elegant, working implementation a year ago). It makes no sense at all for them to have stopped where they did, assuming that in fact they have stopped.
>>
>>What they have done, without any doubt, is stop communicating. It was never their strong suit, but at the point where they were in their product development, they didn't really need communication, they needed product.
>>
>>Now they are delivering neither.
>>
>>I am moving on to here (http://groups.google.com/group/the-prosysplusnet-framework) for the reasons stated there. They are the same reasons that I really liked what eTecnologia was doing, but now will have to be reached using less satisfying but adequate means.
>>
>>I, and others I have talked with, believe there will be some form of xBase.net at some point in the future. Given where eTecnologia reached, it it clearly possible to do this. If it were possible to communicate with them, I would wish them the best: there is great value in attempting and nearly succeeding in what others (in this case Microsoft and those who routinely echo Microsoft's views) have deemed impossible. If nothing else, it teaches us not to take the word of experts who haven't tried to do what they say is impossible. That in fact is how IronPython was born: Jim Hugunin, having completed Jython, Python in Java, spent a weekend trying to prove that it was impossible to do similarly in .Net, and instead proved just the opposite. That's the kind of expert to believe.
>>
>>So, thank you eTecnologia, whoever and wherever you are. And I'd sure like it if you would let us all know what happened to stop the train when the station was in sight.
>>
>>Hank Fay
>
>I know you had high hopes for their effort, and I wish they could have come up with a product (at least a couple of years ago). I really would have liked to see and use it.
>
>I think their window of opportunity closed quite a while ago. Maybe they hit technical roadblocks, or maybe they saw the window close.
>
>It was a cool idea, anyway.