Doug,

>I read all of the discourse. but I do not know at this point if VFP 7.0 will embrace .NET technology. I reviewed the beta, but was thinking that with the divorce, some of the features qand interoperability will be dropped out. I hope not, and I also hope the application development tools will worke together.

There will be quite of lot of interaction possibilities between VFP7 and .NET, since .NET's COM Interop (and in some cases VFP7's IMPLEMENTS feature) allows VFP to call into the .NET Framework. .NET can also call VFP COM objects thru that same plumbing. However, the .NET framework is still in beta and all the issues aren't worked out yet with the Interop layer, so it's not completely smooth sailing at the moment. That will improve.

The other area of great interest is in using VFP to create Web Services that can be called by .NET apps (and apps on other platforms for that matter).

>I have been doing Fox for a long time, and am nearing retirement, and want to bring some new blood online, and seem to be frustrated at most every turn I hate to see anything happen to cause less interest in an intrinsincly excellent middle tier database product.

One of the best things you can do for the future is to analyze your current apps in terms of n-Tier design and start thinking about how you can componentize your app logic. Then, you'll be better positioned for COM and Web Services, and you can convert that logic to another language much easier if it should ever be necessary to do so.