Hey Jeff. I recall that effort from a high level management view. It was more of a dream than an a realistic goal. I think some upper managers at the time of VFP 7 being developed was that VFP 7 would be the last version of VFP, and that people would be moved to .NET. But .NET is very different than VFP for 'data' centric app development.

I think what was done fairly well is to make VFP work better with SQL Server after VFP 7. Both VFP 8 and 9 were new versions approved at a very high level (Eric Rudder). Not all management above VFP wanted to see VFP 8 and then VFP 9 be created. But because with so many VFP developers not moving to .NET, then the big issues would not just be the hundreds of thousands of VFP developers, but the millions of 'Windows' based computers running VFP apps. And for VFP developers not moving to .NET, then non-Microsoft tools like Linux, Java, etc. would become more of a competition. Therefore VFP 8 and then v9 were approved - not for sales of VFP, but for sales and strategy of Windows (and the hope to migrate more VFP developers to .NET over time while VFP evolved).

After VFP 9, even the management of the Fox team expected that VFP would end all work on VFP except for an SP1. But soon after VFP 9 released, I talked to Eric Rudder in person and he told me that he didn't think we could announce that VFP 9 was the last version of VFP right after it was released, it would be bad business for Microsoft and bad for the VFP community. He said we needed to do an Xbase add-on for VFP 9. Then I wrote the details for Sedna, and came up with the idea of a My dot feature like VB.NET had, wrapper classes for accessing .NET functions from VFP (and I selected the ones to include), and the idea for the Windows API wrappers. For SQL Server related new features, the Data Explorer was to be enhanced as part of Sedna. So it was Eric as the sole person in management that is credited for Sedna existing (something after VFP more than just an SP1).

By the time Sedna was started, Randy had left the Fox team (and Microsoft), so there was no program manager on the Fox team, and the team developers only worked on SP1 (and VS related work as well). Related to Sedna, I then worked with the Microsoft legal team to allow the XSource.zip (all VFP components written in VFP) to be allowed to be uploaded and then modified and freely redistributed. Thinking about how the community didn't have one central place for sharing and downloading free/open add-ons for VFP, and a place for enhanced XSource components, I came up with the idea (and name) for the VFPX project. I contacted Craig Boyd, Doug Hennig, and Rick Schummer to ask them to be the original administrators, got them on the private/secret beta of CodePlex.com, and then hired them as vendors to work on development of the various Sedna components.

I wrote up a document with the pros and cons of making Sedna available for free vs. costing something like $99. The two goals of Sedna were to get VFP developers to have more features and better use with other MS products and technologies like the .NET Framework, Windows Vista APIs, and SQL Server. This is not only where Microsoft made money (well beyond VFP sales), but was also the strategy (to move VFP developers to the new/evolving products/platform). The other purpose of Sedna was to buy time for the lifespan of VFP with respect to perception. This was beneficial to both Microsoft and the VFP community. For Microsoft, Sedna delayed the formal announcement over a year that VFP 9 was the last version of VFP. This helped sales of VFP, but also kept more people/businesses using VFP rather than moving to a non-Microsoft platform sooner. It helped the community by delaying the 'VFP is dead' news in the business world.

I once asked some people on the .NET marketing team if they would rather have a FoxPro developer build a new app with VFP, or build a new app with Delphi.NET. They all answered Delphi.NET. Why? Because we live in a business world where it's all about the platform, and the Microsoft platform is Windows+.NET, not Windows+VFP.

In terms of the perception of VFP over time after VFP 9 was released, Sedna was a success. That VFP Roadmap document that I wrote and posted after VFP 9 shipped mainly pointed to Sedna. And while Sedna was just an add-on for VFP, it was a way to appear VFP was evolving and that Microsoft was still committed to VFP. Because the goal of Sedna was to get VFP developers to use other Microsoft products and technologies, it was an easy decision in the end that it would need to be free - and open (enhanced via VFPX).

In the end, Sedna was more about keeping the perception of VFP positive (delay the news of the last version of VFP officially) than it was about the technical implementation or getting VFP developers to use .NET or SQL Server. Even if nobody has used Sedna, not one download, it still served its primary purpose of essentially delaying the negative news in the community and in the tech media that Microsoft had killed VFP, just by saying Microsoft was evolving VFP with Sedna - even though Sedna has nothing to do with the main VFP product and runtime.

And for an excellent example of how great the VFP community is... Fast forwarding just over 5 years to today and I'm thrilled to see that there's a brand new book released this month on Making Sense of Sedna and SP2: http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/makingsos.htm

>During my brief tenure as a Test contractor in the VFP group near about the time of VFP6/7 I recall having the strangest conversation with Ricardo Wenger where he was telling me that the purpose of the next version of VFP was to help move VFP developers to VB.
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>If you really want VFP developers to move to VB or .NET you simply stop making VFP. How does making a new version ease the effort? And really when you consider how crappy VB was compared to VFP why would anyone want to migrate to that?
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>In fact, Ken, you and everybody in the VFP group made it harder to move to .NET with the release of VFP8 and especially VFP9 because they are such solid and complete products. That's a compliment and not a criticism, btw.