Well, I've read some articles that doing so by MS is totally re-writing the whole architecture of the product. With that said, backward compatibility with the current systems done in VB is a big issue. Take a look what happened with VFP, version 3.0 has a lot of headaches and it only started to stabilize with the release of version 5.0 but the damage has been done. Only now it begins to recover slowly because VFP is well architectured and is capable to play with Windows DNA and COM world. You know what, inheritance is really an important feature when it comes to UI design and implementation.