>>They could and should have done more with VFP. This was not a misstep but a full blown strategic disaster brought upon Microsoft by Microsoft. It is as if the worst enemy of Microsoft has always been themselves (developers not included). Again, how many Win OS installations are still out there solely because of VFP apps? The answer to that is a testament to the degree of near-sightedness of MSFT. They looked at VFP sales when they should have looked at WinOS installs because of VFP. It shouldn't take a genius to see it. The very reason they bought FoxPro (strategics) is the reason why they should have continued improving it.
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>Microsoft killed VFP for the one and only reason they brought us Azure, Win8, and Metro: control.
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>VFP meant free, independent "rogue" apps running, and a developer mindset along those lines. It was incompatible with their goals of controlling and monitoring everybody's software use. And the .NET runtime can be easily swapped out for a form which not only works properly, but also serves metrics to external entities in remote cloud environments.

If you don't want your .NET runtime stuff to be sending anything to somewhere you're unaware of then take your stuff off the internet. Having it in VFP vs .NET does not make you any more safe if you're online (if you're that worried about it).

>Developers need to wake up to what's going on here.
>It's all political decision making to control people.
>The financial component is not the driving factor.

Plenty of ones to pick from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages

>Ballmer pushed the political agenda strongly, but in a way that offended users. It's why he's out. Some smooth talking political agenda pushing individual will be next is my guess.

One thing I've spotted in this thread (haven't read much of it) is how many Win OS installations are still out there solely because of VFP apps? That is an interesting question and I bet the number if very VERY VERY tiny. I myself don't know of any.
When VFP came out as 3.0 you could compile your apps for MAC and Windows both. That is actually one of main reasons I decided to go with VFP at the time instead of Delphi..which was windows only. Of course by the time the next version of VFP came out ..version 5 (although I do posses a VFP 4 beta disk..ha) the ability to compile to mac was taken out. I was hoping that they would come out with VFP.NET - but it was explained to me by someone from MS one time that they considered this at one point but decided that it would end up being pretty much the same thing as VB.NET so why bother.
What it boils down to is MS stopped VFP because a) since so few people used it, no money to be made off it and b) It didn't fit in with VB, VC++, C#, or .NET at all, and making it do so would be complete rewrite only to end up with a clone of VB.NET that no one would be using.
As soon as you had a zillion more people using VB6 than you did VFP6 - well it was pretty much downhill from there for lifespan of VFP.