>The problem with these guys is they have the oldster mindset of charging for everything and being unhappy that it's not paying for itself. I think it's a no-brainer at this point that such a solution needs to be Open Source, not a proprietary product controlled by a small group of people. The more you get the community involved the more a product will have a life of its own. Regarding VFP, look at what's going on at CodePlex. I predict many of these solutions will come out of there..

The problem with the three products listed below is primarily three letters : VFP.

I was closely enough involved over the course of 15 years with what was certainly one of the best commercial Fox frameworks and know enough of the other prominent tool vendors to say that even at its peak the Fox community was terrible at seeing the value of or being willing to spend money for 3rd party tools. People did not make anywhere near the kind of money writing tools that they could just using their skills to write apps. So when app work became their primary focus and the market moved away from VFP, they left - or at least stopped putting effort into VFP. ( folks like Doug and Rick Schummer are part of a core of remarkable exceptions but again, I don't think the remaining Fox developers as a group have a clue about how very lucky they are to have them )

I think it is one of the reasons why so many who had the most to lose by changing platforms as they represented some of the most experienced and talented VFP developers jumped ship starting in 1998-99. As the VFP community started to dwindle, so did the median skill-set.

The potential market for the 3 products listed below was, I would guess, less than 10% of the potential market we had in 1999 for Visual Fox Express, and would only really appeal to those who wanted to cling to VFP in some hybridized fashion and join a "community" in the dozens. I just don't see where it was a sustainable model.

I loved the Fox and was there for all the highpoints and for an amazing community of wildly talented people ( and some truly increidble boneheads)- but that has pretty much dispersed now and I don't think the numbers are there to recapture the magic.

As to writing VFP apps in notepad - well, you could probably do it but my God, why ? <g>

>
>>That would be great to see, but they don't always mature. Whatever happened to:
>
>.>NET Extender for VFP
>>VFPCompiler for .NET
>>or
>>VFP Studio
>
>>With small teams, they just disappear....or don't have the time and resources to keep up with the "big guys"
>
>.·*´¨)
>.·`TCH