Time for my $.02, since everyone was asking for it. :)

VB is definitely a tool to know if you are working with Microsoft's platform, no matter what. You can't even be a MS C++ programmer and not have some VB in your head. I think VB will "always" be core to MS, if for no other reason than they completely own the BASIC market and can modify it, etc in order to make the most money out of their product line. VB/Script is the glue for everything MS makes, that's what they project to the world.

However, inside MS, it's a different show. A decent amount of OS programmers (definitely in the NT/Win2k groups, not sure about the 9x dev groups) are not using VB/Script to get things done, they are using Perl. Perl is very heavily used for "everything". Perl is fast, cross-platform (you don't think they only use Windows at Microsoft, do you?), the string handling and regular expressions are smokin', the syntax is pretty C-like, and code is tight, and there is a huge community and codebase out there. Oh, and it's free and open-source.

Witness the announcement last year between Active State (leading Win32 Perl builder) and Microsoft. MS needs the power of Perl and Active State needs the distribution/$power of Microsoft. The MS marketing machine and the MS engineering machines have never seen eye-to-eye, and that's why you get the "VB everywhere" message from marketing while the internal guys are doing something completely different... And if Perl is so well-respected inside MS (something they don't make and can't control as a company), I am sure there is regard for VFP.

I think VB is a decent skill to have, but then I think having Perl knowledge is is equal to if not more important, depending on the job. If you have a decent .pl script to grab some remote info, encode it, sort it, and spit it out, the same code will basically run on Win32, Linux, a Tandem mini, an HP9000 HP/UX monster, and a SGI box - I know because I worked on a project at my last employer to do just that.

I think VFP's "demise" is really a marketing machination and not what Is Officially Happening (TM). While the folks inside Redmond are doing one thing (like evolving VFP), the ones outside of it are doing something else (like making it easy for IT non-thinkers to abandon it). Microsoft is so big that it can afford to have this kind of frontend/backend disconnect, still make money, and not really notice. If VFP evaporated tomorrow, MS would lose say $500 million in a year, so they'd just raise the price of MS Monster Truck by $19 and keep on rolling...

By the time someone/anyone at MS realizes that they should have put more energy into VFP, n years will have passed and we probably won't be using it anyway. It'll probably be called "MS Data Language Extensions for the .NBM (.NetBASICMachine)". In the mean time, they will continue to make more money from developers and we'll make more money as developers, no matter what they call it.

What I do now when I get "FoxPro is dead" talk from around my workplace (and I do), is just do a little re-educating. I refer them to MS docs, show them the coolness of intrinsic data-handing and Remote Views, and show how to use VB with VFP to make something cool. But I also let them know that ADO cursor technology (not to mention Access' Jet) is a subset of what VFP has and SQL-Server's query engine is a superset of what VFP has, and that VFP is used at MS no matter what the marketing machine says. One thing that a pure-VBer doesn't have to do a lot is think about the non-VB world, which has drawbacks on many levels.

Oh, and I let them know that FoxPro is definitely dead. *Visual FoxPro* is the skill to have.