< dons Nomex suit, with fingers on the Halon triggers >

IMO, the recent VB7 and Visual Studio NextGen announcements have effectively passed a death sentence on VFP. Threats I see are:

1. Loss of our best & brightest (primarily framework developers/vendors) as they shift focus to creating products for VB.

2. Loss of new entrants to VFP.

If I were a framework vendor, I'd be looking hard at VB right now. The relative dearth of framework-type products in the VB market is a huge opportunity for our experienced framework developers. This is pure speculation, but I'm guessing that some frameworks - especially the ones that are already n-tier oriented - won't be that hard to convert to/for VB7.

Framework vendors could be working with VB7 betas in 4 - 6 months, if not earlier, and have a good chance to have a product ready for release by the time VS7 ships, a year or so from now. Production-ready frameworks should be available at the same time that VB7 itself is largely debugged, at the release date of VS7 SP1.

Speaking for myself, if there was a good framework available for VB, I'd buy it and learn it and VB. I suspect I'd use it for an increasing portion of my work as time went by.

As for new entrants, here I'm talking about corporate IT shops and students/new programmers. If VB7 acquires VFP-style object orientation and third parties deliver robust frameworks/libraries, a great deal of VFP's perceived advantage will vanish. It will be even more of an uphill battle to get VFP into the corporate suite. With fewer competitive advantages, new programmers and students will have less incentive to learn a "niche" language. Ditto for college/university curriculae, etc.

So, my bold speculations (I can't call them predictions):
1. The VFP dev team at MS is fighting for their lives as you read this. They have been asked to justify the existence of VFP as a separate product past version 7.

2. If VB7 can successfully incorporate its new features - primarily inheritance - new VFP development will cease. That is unlikely to be announced at the VS7 release date; I would guess at the release of VS7 SP1. Hence the "dead man walking" - I speculate that VFP has about 15-18 months before being officially "killed".

Clearly, the plot is thickening... < g >. Given VB's upcoming shot of steroids, what will it take to save our favourite product?

BTW I should mention that I've never written a single line of any version of Basic in my entire life - so I'm not exactly a VB bigot...