I was particularly struck by this line in Ken's blog post :

" But by the time VFP 9.0 was released, the amount of sales for all versions of VFP combined annually was less revenue than Microsoft sales of Visual Studio in only one day. "

I have to say that the further I get into .NET 4.0 ( the VFP 6.0 of .NET <g> ) the more I "get" why the strategy to move from COM and GDI made good sense. I think what a lot of our Fox community misses is that there were a lot of reasons besides its imminent demise why many top level Fox developers migrated to .NET over the last ten years. I'd be interested to know how former successful VFP developers who have made the transition to successful .NET developers would feel about going back to the VFP paradigm even if VFP were a supported product at MS.


>You're mistaken that VFP was discontinued because Microsoft saw it as a strong competitor to .NET. There are two reasons. 1) VFP sales were declining and VFP either had or was close to the point where sales did not cover expenses of continued development. 2) DevDiv made the decision that COM-based tools were not the future. It was .NET. Therefore, VFP did not fit.
>
>>You should look at this as a compliment to VFP that Microsoft looked upon VFP as strong enough of a competitor to their .NET product that they thought they had to discontinue it. While MS Access is weak enough on the low end to demand upgrades to MS higher end products if the client grows. For example, there are built-in limitations to ms-access on the web when using for web applications.
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>>My belief, however, is that VFP will be even more of a competitor in its present state with the community building around it like with ActiveVFP and CodePlex. Ever hear of PHP? There's no Microsoft or Oracle behind it. Just a community of developers. And VFP beats PHP with no problem as far as technology and features on Windows are concerned.