>Very well put, Rick.
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>The more I look at it, the more I come to the conclusion that not having VFP in the CLR (I know, a hot topic) is no big deal. If you're using the common development environment, you are going to have to know something about technologies external to VFP anyway and it's just not that hard to write VB code if you know how you would want to do it from Fox.

I agree and this is really what I've been telling people who've been asking. I honestly think we are better off with VFP staying what it is than going CLR, because that way at least you have a tool that is getting something new that you can simply add to your existing apps.

If you think .Net is all it's cracked up to be (and only time will tell) then doing it in C# (my choice) or VB is not a big deal. If you look at the code you write with either of these you'll find that because of the CLR usage it's almost identical.

What bugs me is that you can do just about everything that's hot in .Net today. it takes some work for sure, but at least you can see what's happening behind the scenes. With XML and HTTP much of this is simple. And with it you're even going to be able to interact with .Net from non-CLR apps like VFP.

.Net is a morass of black box system code that if something goes bad will hose without a way out. MS has a big job ahead of them making sure all this shit works right in only a half a year's time and given the past track record I'm not sure we should automatically expect it all to work correctly beyond the demos presented at the latest trade show.




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>I think the real interesting time is going to come when they move Office to a web-centric application server as they are talking about doing for Office 10 or 11. We are more or less used to at least the concept of ".NET" but wait till it's shoved down the general user community's throat.
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>>Well, Microsoft has been saying that VStudio.Net won't be shipping at least until next summer, so at least a half a year before you can really use this technology. Then there's the 1.0 period you might want to wait out <s>...
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>>Reality is though that technically, Microsoft has pretty much laid out what .Net is with the NGWS SDK preview that shipped a few weeks back. You can build working progrgams with it today, although it's not easy and the documentation is near useless at this point. And it'll probably change some (syntax, names etc.) but the overall theory is rather well defined.
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>>The only thing on that end one can really fault Microsoft for is playing the vaporware trump card to all it's worth over a half a year ahead of time making people possibly hold of in anticipation of .Net. A half a year is a half a lifetime in Internet time.
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>>The bad news is that a lot of this stuff completely changes the whole development landscape and investment in tools and technologies (COM in particular) is being relegated severely. I personally am not sure this was the right way to approach moving to a Net enabled platform. Microsoft must have known this was the direction they were going to take at least 1 year ago and here up to the PDC everything was balls out for Build COM, Build Windows DNA. Now the tune changes completely and investment in COM is doubtful for .Net.
>>But a lot can change between now and next summer and I think if .Net is to be successful it'll need much better interop with 'legacy' COM (isn't it funny how quickly something becomes legacy in Microsoft's world???).
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>>I've been playing with this stuff for the last few weeks and it definitely has it's 'this is extremely cool' moments, but then you look back at how long it takes to write those 10 lines of 'cool' code because it's all new and you have to wonder what it would take to build a full scale application that way! It's not like you'll be learning a language, but a very large and complex runtime library.
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>>What's funny to me is that the whole CLR looks much more like Java and the Java VM than either VB (even when actually writing VB code!), VC or VFP. This after all the Java bashing from MS is pure hypocricy.
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>>+++ Rick ---