Hi Robert,

SNIP
>>2.) Politics: I like having VFP in VS since it gives weight to the argument >that MS considers it a full-fledged development tool.
>
>When the Visual Studio world was Windows DNA, this argument held some weight. But now the Visual Studio world is .NET, CLR, Framework. VFP is not a .NET language. You can't write VFP code behind a Web Form or a Windows Form and you can't do cross-language inheritance. So does this argument hold any weight moving forward?
>
Well I've heard of many getting lots of mileage out of the simple fact that VFP is already in the shop by virtue of VS being there. Apparently that...
a) surprised the listener;
b) left him/her with little argument *against* VFP, since any such argument was invariably based solely on the VFP is dying rumour (and not at all on technical issues of any kind).

>>Anyway, who can say that VFP 8/9 won't be fully compatible with .NET version >2.0
>
>The community has made it pretty clear to us that they don't want VFP to become a .NET language, because what you wind up with really won't be Fox. Do you think you will feel differently a year from now when we are hard at work on VFP 8?
>
Sure, when there is a constraint that we'd have to give up most of what makes Fox a fox, NONE OF US WANT IT AS A .NET LANGUAGE. This is like the old 'they can have any colour as long as it's black' in Henry Ford's day. Let .NET languages do what business need to do, at the speed that they need to do it, and you'd get a different answer.
Seems to me that BASIC (thus VB) was the first ever programming language to not have file I/O integrated into it. I know that Autocoder and OS Assembler (via macros (not fox-style)) and Fortran and COBOL all had I/O integrated. dBase was a "killer app" because it had integrated I/O.
Business is data and data is business. I've read one of the VB gurus saying "I don't do data". Good for him. I guess he's found a nice niche market (probably supporting other VBers would be my guess).
I'd bet that, sooner or later, .NET will have to grow to have data integrated into its "languages". That's why I'd like to see VFP pushed into it now *with* all of the attributes of Fox of course.

Regards,

JimN


>Robert