>Snip:
>>Why is it overkill? It is just a much more versatile and much more capable development platform for developing Windows, web, and mobile applications with a far superior IDE.
>>
>>The SQLExpress database engine comes with it, is free, is extremely robust, supports larger databases, and includes Reporting Services for making reports you can use anywhere.
>>
>>This is still an actively supported environment with a future. It is not dead-ended as VFP is.
>
>Overkill because I don't need web or mobile capabilities. I don't need Silverlight, WPF, WCF, blah, blah, blah. At least not yet. A far superior IDE? OK. But with all the TLA (three letter acrynoms) technology thrown into .NET, MS needed to beef up the VS IDE just to make it less painful and easier to use. As an aside, I loved the VS IDE way back when I started dabbling with .NET. The tabbed/dockable/flyout panels was way cool!! But guess what? I couldn't duplicate those features in my finished .NET app!!! Did MS think that those features were too good to be duplicated in any apps that were built in VS. Apparently so.

Don't know when 'way back' was :-} - but you can certainly now do anything the IDE does if using WPF.....

>
>VFP is "dead-ended" from MS's POV. To me, it won't die until the OS makes it die and as long as the current OSs are still around the people I create apps for don't care if the OS is XP, Vista, 7, or "the next big OS to come". In fact when the POS I mentioned before is started, most users never see the desktop. The VFP app kicks in then on exiting, shuts down the computer. OS? What OS? I believe this scenario is what most would consider the "mom and pop" business and once again, I don't think we could ever determine how many of those exist.