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I've always wondered about some of your prior arguments here. It now seems to me that your arguments are highly based on emotions.
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Walter is in good company here. Ultimately, it boils down to religion: my god is better than your god - bcause I say so.....

More generically, you can break it down to my X is better than your Y - because I say so. I suppose this would be on the read to relevant if I was proclaiming that alternative technologies where necessarily better from a technical standpoint than VFP.

No matter what happens to .NET, VFP's lot in the world will not change. This is in reponse to those who try and re-frame my argument this way:

X will survive because Y is not proven.

Whether .NET is a success or failure, VFP's future fate is sealed. If .NET failed, it would be bad for VFP developers since .NET is the next logical place to go. Some may say Java - and given the new world order - who is to say this is out of line. Then again, I don't see Java being a player in desktop apps. OTOH, I do see where .NET can build desktop apps.

Folks need to look at Fox on its own terms and look how it has been accepted (or not accepted) in the world at large. To date, nobody can point to a single SIGNIGICANT upward trend for VFP that will have bearing on how it is accepted in the outside world. Ask for something significant in the product and you are likely to be greeted with "we don't have the budget/resources to do that.." Sorry, but I don't have time to support a product that has limited support by its vendor.

There are those that are doing just fine with Fox and the product serves their needs TODAY and for the foreseeable future. Of course, the same could be said for the legions of VB 6 developers too......and look what happened. What has happened to a large segment of the VB 6 community is much like what has happened to the VFP community. The only difference is that VFP has been going under slowly. VB 6's head was hacked off and mercifully put to a quick death...

IAC, my points are summarized as follows:

1. Nobody should dump VFP today. Anybody who characterizes my point on this is
wrong. VFP is your cash cow of today that can stimulate your education in a
tool for the future.

2. .NET is not necessarly the future for all VFP developers. Although I feel
this is the most logical choice, it is possible that some VFP developers
could find their way to Java or go behind the DMZ to be a SQL Server DBA...
Given the trends and where VFP is in the world today and the amount of
development resources devoted to the product, while I may not know with
100% certainty whether .NET will be the tool of the future, I know that VFP
will not be.

3. Somewhat related to 2 - whatever happens to .NET - the future for VFP will
not change. If .NET flops, VB 6 is still around and will continue to be
used. You will have to ask yourself the hard question of whether people
that did not like VFP before, why would they go to VFP if the same
alternatives exist.

4. Don't get confused between VS .NET, the .NET Framework and the .NET
servers. There are those who will try and link the servers with the
framework. Even MS will tell you that for the most part, calling something
a .NET server is nothing more than a label. i.e., SQL Server and IIS are
.NET servers. VS is built on and implements the framework - which is a
separate environment. If I want to use Access and other data engine as my
.NET application backend - I could...


Just a few things to chew on....