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>I accept that to a point, certainly bugs need to be fixed, but there were many other things that people were begging for which would have improved the usability enormously. Consistency across Menus and forms, grids, lists and combo boxes, better print handling and many other things that I saw on this forum that I (speaking from limited awareness I admit) would have thought to be higher on the agenda that what was delivered.

What many people, including you it seems, need to remember is that VFP is not on it's own anymore. It is part of Microsoft and Visual Studio. This means that it has to support specific technologies that Microsoft determines are important, ie, COM, MTS, MSMQ, etc. Without supporting these, VFP would suffer the fate of the doomsayers. Also, as part of Visual Studio, the VFP team does not control the schedule. They are given a date and must prioritize the enhancements/bug fixes and determine what can get done in that time frame. Would I like to see more in VFP? Yes! Am I happy with VFP 6.0? Yes! COM, MTS, and other technologies and extremely important to us as developers and I'm excited to have them.

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>>>I haven't upgraded because I can't see any visible reason why it would be worth it for me, being just a part-time programmer. I would hope that v7 would have some solid changes in basic usability features.
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>>The bug fixes alone are worth it. IMO, you are taking the same approach as people who still have Fox 2.x apps running. "The program is still working fine, so why upgrade it?" They are now having many problems from Y2K to fast processors. Do the upgrade. It is well worth it.
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>Well, that is my attitude to a point. We have a saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" If the program is working fine, then why upgrade. Of course it's not as simple as that - as your Y2K example shows - fortuneately all my Fox 2.6 apps are now either to be ditched or are running on VFP5, but there have been plenty of comments about a whole new raft of bugs in the upgrade!

Just cause you can't see things doesn't mean that you shouldn't upgrade. If you go to a doctor and he says "Your heart is sick, you need a pacemaker", are you going to say "I can't see my heart. Don't do anything." This was a case where VFP was sick (there were many bug...some from the 2.x days that were fixed). There were also new things added (the pacemaker) that make it easier for us as developers to make a living and create better applications for our customers. Your saying that VFP wasn't broke doesn't hold water because there were many things in VFP 5.0 that were bugs. Also, using your theory, VFP would never change cause it worked. VFP 6.0 works better.

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>Sometimes I think it's because it doesn't take enough notice of its heritage - that is in the dbase, foxpro line and gives far move credence to its Visual Basic like enhancements. Still, I guess it's always a compromise!

The VFP team has gone to great lengths to keep backward compatability as much as possible. They are working with the same codebase that has existed since the 2.x days. This has led to other problems that have not been easy to overcome. For example, there are global variables all over in the VFP code. This made it very difficult to do OOP.