>I'm a bit concerned that MS is adding features to VFP that few other than gurus can understand or use. Those users are going to upgrade anyways and are relatively few in number. If MS wants everyone to upgrade right away, put in stuff everyone can use.

I belive that the new features in VFP 7.0 are targeted for the most VFP developers, not just a few. VFP 7.0 offers a great deal of great new features that benefit all VFP developers and it is also probably the easiest learning curve of any VFP upgrade ever. A list of new features in VFP 7.0 can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro/prodinfo/new.asp. The Fox team at Microsoft listens very carefully to the VFP customer base as to what features they would like to see in the next version, and the VFP developers I have talked to in the past few months all seem to think that VFP 7.0 is a great upgrade, and I am confident we have delivered a great new version for VFP developers.

>
>Some might argue that MS is trying to kill the .DBF data store and migrate everyone over to some flavour of SQL Server. If they want to do that, make it as easy to manipulate SS views or recordsets as it is to use the native VFP equivalents.

VFP 7.0 has a great deal of new features around the DBD/DBF engine, including full DBC events and an OLE DB provider. VFP7 is a fantastic client to SQLServer as you can use the great data-centric langauge and features against SQLServer data via remote views just like you can against DBF data. Plus, VFP 7.0 has new XML features including XMLUpdateGram() which is compatible with the XML features of SQLServer2000.

>My main point is that it's been a long time since we saw a breakthrough improvement in the Fox. I don't know how far back you go, but I'll recall my impressions:

VFP 7.0 is the first Microsoft developer tool to ship with full XML Web services support integrated into intellisense, which includes SOAP client and WSDL server generation. VFP 7.0 is the only MS product to have full extensibile IntelliSense, something that no other MS product has and is a major breakthrough.

>- VFP7 (which I don't own yet) - Intellisense looks "cool" but it isn't a language enhancement. That and improved Web support can't really be considered breakthroughs if they are already present in other products and we're just playing catch-up.

VFP 7.0 has the most advanced IntelliSense engine of any MS product, and that will remain the case even after Visual Studio .NET is released. There are over 50 new commands and function additions/enhancements in VFP 7.0.

About upgrades. What I said at DevCon is that the Fox community can help Microsoft (the Fox team) in upgrading to VFP 7.0. Sometimes people wait a while to upgrade but we feel that VFP 7.0 is a product that is ready for upgrading now with the great new features, great stability, etc. There are lots of new marketing efforts around VFP going on at Microsoft now. They keynote video/audio from DevCon last week was recorded and will be posted on the http://msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro web site soon.