A few hours ago here at ServoyWorld 2011 in Amsterdam, I showed the new Command Console feature just added to the Servoy 6 beta. The Command Console in the Eclipse IDE is fully based on the VFP Command Window, which I helped Servoy design, and also has many features supported by FoxCode as well as Visual Studio code snippets. All of the VFP developers who see demos of Servoy have the same reaction, that they are fairly blown away at how much Servoy is like VFP and feels like a VFP 10+. I'll be posting more about Servoy 6 and news from ServoyWorld 2011 in a Feb newsletter soon at http://servoy.com/foxpro. IBM was in the closing keynote announcing a big partnership with Servoy.

A Dutch VFP developer who attended my Servoy webinar less than 3 months ago in the Netherlands has owned http://visualfoxpro.com for many years, and once tried to give to MS when I was the VFP product manager, but the msdn.com team didn't want it. He's been learning Servoy part-time in the last few months and gave some awesome data manipulation and performance demos in the FoxPro Night session. He's been pretty active with http://visualfoxpro.com lately. And during the presentation when wOOdy wasn't doing demos, wOOdy updated http://vfp-conversion.com and had it auto re-direct to http://visualfoxpro.com. The FoxPro Night on Servoy session went from 7:00pm to 1:00am, then the bar was crowded until 3:00am. Reminds me of FoxPro/VFP conferences of 15+ years ago.

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