>>
>Here are some interesting quotes from the Orlando Devcon in 1993. How time flies.
><
>
>I was there. That was my first Devcon. IMO, that was the last "great" devcon for Foxpro. I suppose the 1995 Devcon in San Diego was close with respect to the number of people. However, with the bugs with VFP 3 Beta 2B, it was a disaster with respect to presenters trying to get code to run reliably.
>
>In 1993, Roger Heinen gave the keynote. Back then, he talked about a day when a unified tool would exist. In fact, that what it was called - the Unified Tools Strategy. For the most part, much of what he said did come true or will be true if current trends prevail.
>
>If you really want to dig into some history, check out John Hawkin's article in the June 1993 issue of FPA. In that article, John does a post-mortem on the 12 months since MS acquired Fox.
>
>It was very insightful. It questioned why the acquisition was made in light of MS's new Cirrus Project (You know it as Access...) - and the fact that VB is clearly the tool that MS is squarely behind.
>
>< JVP >

John, now we know that despite working on Access, MS bought FP to have one less potentially important competitor (like you mentioned, 3000 developers attended the FP 1993 DevCon). Too bad for me they also chose to "deemphasize" FP. Naturally, from their point of view, that made sense.

VB.NET shapes similarly as MS once again pushes developers kicking and screaming in the direction that is best for MS. I think they have enough money and market power to persist until the current generation of VB developers accepts .NET or the programmers raised on .NET take over in a few years.

Alex