Dear Robert,

snip

>I would agree with that. But VS.NET is not marketing-driven. It is driven by the experiences of customers. The product team, senior management and marketing did 100s of customer visits and spent huge amounts of time studying the experiences of customers using the 6.0 set of tools and then projected forward to where Internet development is going (Some have argued that Web Services is just Microsoft FUD, but look at how IBM, Oracle and Sun all have Web Services as a core part of their strategy to see how it is an industry thing.) and derived an application architecture (.NET Framework) and a tool to make building Web apps better.

The market reality is that new technology is exciting and do sell products even though it might not be the best approach. Time will tell whether it would be accepted or not. To provide 100 percent backward compatiblity is in reality not possible and would hold back on advancement. This is what I see in the VFP community and the resistance to change. IMOH, VFP should be supporting CLR and to those who do not like the idea then stick to version 6.0. Take a look at the beta VFP 7 and you would see that most of the enhancement are those that are currently support by the other languages in VS6 so that is not improvement for the language. Again VFP should not be seen as a second tier/class programming language and support for CLR is crucial for its long term survival.


Regards,
Kueh.