Charlie,

>It will be interesting to see how VB and VFP are positioned in MS product line in the future. They are becoming so closely related that I can't see MS supporting both products much longer. Maybe they will somehow merge.

If the trend toward shared common tools like Web Forms continues, and we eventually reach the point where *everything* needed for a desktop or web application can be done with those common tools with drag and dropping of controls and checking off a few properties for validation rules, etc, regardless of the underlying language, then language really won't matter that much anymore will it?

We're not there yet. I'm waiting to see just how far they will push things like rich UI in the browser not requiring round-trips to the server. Plain 3.2 HTML that will be created by Web Forms won't take us all the way, but if they enable advanced UI conditionally depending on the browser (DHTML, etc) then maybe.

Also I think the Web Services (XML/SOAP) over HTTP is also *really* big in eventually replacing DCOM with a platform-independent distributed approach and allowing formal desktop apps to talk easily to distributed components scattered all over the universe.

Rick Strahl already has the tools in place with wwXML, wwSQL and wwIPStuff to do that now over HTTP, and it's way cool.