>It is surprising how well we can do with pure custom code, light components (foxisapi, your west-wind connection, foxweb) and MS’s own technology (ISAPI, VFP) without going deep and deep into gigabytes of blackbox components and DLL hell.

I agree and this is the main reason I love to work in VFP. It has the tools to make this job easy...

The reality of .Net is that you can do 90% of what .Net does today with VFP 6.0 code. Or VB 6 for that matter. But it's not easy unless you've put in your time. I think MS has the right idea on making this stuff easier - I'm just not a big fan of the way they're doing it by throwing everything and starting from scratch. This is just not a very efficient way in any environment - especially when you're basically not giving developers a choice. If you go to VS7 you have to embrace .Net and CLR. There's not much of an option to not do that. VFP is the exception as is VC if you write non-managed code.

One could argue that VFP folks are getting a bonus of not having to change everything for really no new features - just repackaging. I'm not sure that's a good argument however as the hype will not recognize simple truths like this.