I don't know why everybody is getting so excited about vaporware at this point in the VStudio cycle... C'mon people - VS7 is almost a year away!

How many times have you heard that Web development will be so easy that it's just like ... (fill in your favorite easy task here). Remember when VI first came out? It was going to be the killer Internet Development system - yeah right. Granted VS7 is going to have some really cool stuff in it. But it's so far away it's ridiculous to speculate at this time...

The other thing is that this technology is neither original nor something that you can't do today already with VFP or otherwise. All MS is doing is putting a black box around it so it integrates with the dev tools and becomes proprietary! All the stuff is based on servers serving XML and clients consuming that XML. You can do this today with absolutely minimal amounts of code already (assuming you have a Web server in place).

There are actually two issues: WebForms and WebServices. WebServices is something I consider very useful, but I'm seriously wondering why you'd need to have this wrapped. All the tools to do this are already available and you can accomplish the core of these services today. WebForms on the other hand intend to provide GUI like development environment for HTML forms. I've been in on several discussions on this topic and I've been rather surprised how negative the reactions have been to this from current Web developers who can understand the issues involved (ie. read through the hype).

I have several issues here:

a) contrary to what you may think it is unlikely to be easy - you still have to know how the plumbing works to take advantage of all of this. If you do you'll find that you can do this on your own relative easily - today!

b) The whole Webform thing goes very contrary to the whole nature of the Internet. WebForms build to the lowest common denominator as they have to work with any browser - what you'll end up with is a vastly reduced UI.

c) it's going to be black box code and a lot of it. Going by past MS performance with server and system components I'd be worried about trusting so much plumbing to non-visible code. This is code that you won't have a chance to work aroudn if it breaks. Heck, just this week I lost my FP extensions and they're irrevokably hosed and I have to reinstall Windows 2000 to fix this problem that hoses FP and VI on my system. Think about components like RDS and even ASP up until NT SP4 and how many problems there were with mysterious crashes and lockups - if you've ever tried to debug these or even trace them to these components you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

d) Hard to say how this will play, but performance of these forms is likely to be an issue since there's so much pass through happening. this maybe Ok for small intranet applications, but for the 'broadband' (MS term <s>) I'd be very surprised to see this having much appeal.

I have no doubt that once this stuff ships it'll be rapidly adopted. People always want shortcuts, but the reality is every shortcut comes with a price tag.