>>>I believe that this (your reasoning) makes a lot of sense and will do my best to stay out of future discussions on the matter.
>>
>>Jim,
>>
>>I certainly hope you do not stay out of discussions. Differing opinions serve to extract the most information in any discussion. I am sure you are not alone is wanting to see a CLR version of VFP.
>
>Sure. Majority of my colleagues here want VFP to be .Net language. Regardless of technical reasons why it should NOT be, it doesn't matter and we don't care. Why some of you keep on saying that we'll be losing majority of VFP features? VFP3 had gone in this scenario with prior versions. JVP said "...despite impressions to the contrary, VB .Net and VB are very much the same. Yes, there are some differences, but in all material respects, they are the same."
>If VFP will not play with .Net as natively as VB, VFP religion will be gone. It may not be sooner but because we can't see any future of it - as some you said, ".Net is the future", we'll start looking for life jackets. We love the VFP community - not C#, not VB community. Our managers would always ask me why learning another language? I simply answered them with "because VFP is not the future." For Independent Developers, learning another language is not a big issue, maybe, but for software development company, it is a BIG one for economic reasons. I can learn other language as I am doing (and I did with VB6 as I successfully completed 2 non-database applications) but my expertise is still on VFP and my home and life blood is still VFP.
>
>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.

From what I understand, it's not a resources issue, but rather that the datacentric orientation of the language would have to go. It's not that VFP7 is not .net compatible, but that it's not in the CLR, and if I read the stuff right, that is a requirement for it to be considered a .net language.