>Lastly, I think making VFP.Net backward compatible with what it is today is not more on a POSSIBILITY issue, but rather a resources issue. And to think that MS is not a social service company, it's a big blow. And so I dare Steve Ballmer or Robert Green: If you want us to be happy, then solve the resources issue. We BET on you, then BET on us and we will not be disappointed.
We are not being abandoned in the .Net scheme; in essence, we have a layer between us and .Net (InterOp), a minor deployment issue regarding the registration of COM objects as WSDL, and a runtime that provides us with a rich set of constructs not available inside of the CLR at present. We can play in the sandbox. We can develop portions of our application which are appropriate to VFP in VFP, and develop the remainder in a managed code environment where appropriate, with a relatively small charge to interface between the two. We have time to transit to more appropriate technology, the forewarning that change is coming, and hopefully the native intellect and flexibility to adapt in time. Start by rethinking your designs and continuing to use VFP, and transition to other platforms as the requirements arise, having already allowed for such in your designs through appropriate isolation and encapsulation of functionality.
The cost is to the idiots who continue to think in terms of maintaining monolithic single tier apps in a single language on a single platform. They're the ones who will go extinct like their reptilian predecessors. The VB community has a far steeper learning curve to deal with than we do; if you've been developing in an OO fashion, using multi-tiered design, then you already know the secret to playing nice with .Net - programming to the interface. If not, well, rent a clue; Darwin got it right!
Insisting that backwards compatibility represents a pact between MS and the VFP developer community is like saying that the international travel community has to fully support intercontinental transport in paddled birch-bark canoes; since our forefathers did it that way, we have to sanction and encourage the continuation of that tradition for moving billions of gallons of oil across the ocean. The world isn't that dumb; human society has learned to adapt and adopt new technologies when the capabilities of an older one are no longer sufficient to meet present requirements. Perhaps several billion years of evolution should teach us something...
