>I sorely miss the command window and prototyping tools. Much longer to do crap in .NET

I admit the command window has something to be said for it, but I find it an easy trade off for good intellisense, snippets, a real test harness (which can also be used for a lot of the stuff I used to use the command window for), finding stupid typos as I type them rather than at run-time, a serious debugger, a compiler that actually gives me a clue what the problem is, easy source control, WPF, EF, integration with the Windows API and being able to Google for answers. <s> I also do not miss COM at all, especially when deploying.

As to prototyping tools ? Did I miss something in VFP? Or do you mean the data window? For UI in .NET Sketchflow is kind of cool.

Don't get me wrong, I loved working in VFP, but when I have to go back to it now it's like going back to FPW 2.6 from VFP 9.0.

( Regarding the taking much long in .NET I'd really encourage anyone to check out the many many tools that are out there to cut development time dramatically.)



Did I mis
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>IMO, MS dumpin on and dumping COM is mostly FUD because it's a power play (maybe a slight technical advantage). There's nothing inherently wrong with COM. And COM in Windows is better than stuff like PHP on Windows which Microsoft is furiously back-pedaling to be like because it's so easy and popular.
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>>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.
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>>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.