>>>>>I do find it amusing, however, that it only took 20 years for Microsoft to finally kill VFP through non-marketing. If you don't market it, you don't sell it...and eventually you can say "Well, it's not selling, so we're not going to develop it any more"
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>>>>>Self fulfilling prophecy anyone?
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>>>>Yep exactly. WHY it didn't sell is a whole different thing. Plus I think it must be hard for MS to even know how many people were actually using it. Lot of developers got VFP with MSDN subscription or as part of dev studio - so maybe no one used VFP as part of dev studio - maybe some did - but no real way to tell. VFP was always different animal than rest of dev studio - the controls for the screens are all different than all the others and the way it paints forms etc etc etc. It just didn't fit in with everything else so of course they had to give it the ax. X-Base environment was dying prior to death of VFP too so all these things together and it's just not worth it to MS to keep it alive.
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>>>I've never really followed this whole VFP debate but weren't MS intending to include VFP as a supported .NET language - and the idea was rejected by the VFP community ?
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>>Given that MS's 'mode of operation' around that time was 'buy whatever's better than we can produce, gut it and kill it' (anyone remember Stacker?), it's my belief that MS bought VFP 'cuz they couldn't out-Fox Fox with Access with the plan on yanking the good stuff, backhanding it into Access and howdy-poofda! LOOK! Better than Fox!! and homegrown to boot!!
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>Stacker, wow, that's a blast from the past. I do remember it and even had it. It filled a niche when hard drives were small capacity and expensive.

Yup, until MS did a 'bait and switch' on them, got sued and lost.