Hi Robert,

>You are wise to be cautious. But our job as a software company is to provide our customers with the tools to move forward. Sun, Oracle and IBM are doing it. We can't sit back and say "The Web has problems. We will not make tools for it until those problems are solved." Our customers would say "My competitors are on the Web. I need to be or I am dead. Who makes tools I want to use?"

Very true, but just because MS is, apparently, delegitimizing desktop and 2/3 tier client/server development doesn't mean that it's not going on. I think it was Alex Weider raised outstanding points on that issue.

I think a more important issue is planning a strategy for taking it out of the VS box if that's the way this issue goes. There needs to be marketing and there needs to be a goal; a clearly defined role for VFP as a development tool. And that role has to be hammered in marketing.

If you take it out of the box and continue the type of marketing that we saw when 6.0 came out (such as "Visual FoxPro 6 - a great upgrade for Visual FoxPro developers") then what's the point?

I would suspect that if it's taken outta the box, then MS is going to expect it to have a role and be profitable, right?

I also don't quite buy the argument that to expose data to the web, all internal applications have got to go n-tier. I know plenty of real world situations where the enterprise data resides in a server db, is exposed to the web, and plenty of in-house apps hit that data physically 2-tier.

Ever see the way pure Oracle applications are crafted? Solid, heavyweight, physical 2-tier. And if you look at lists of which tech books are selling the top 10 are rife with Oracle tools books.

I would think that that's an area of development that "Fox Rocks!" in..... if MS would push that aspect and plan for it. Pushing a Fox/SQL Server combo that could compete with Oracle/Oracle or Powerbuilder/Sybase would strengthen MS, earn a profit, and not at all detract from .NET.