I could only guess as to motives - but IF VFP is not long for the world - you have to look at where the VFP team might end up at MS - the enthusiasm in championing VB .NET goes beyond what rational arguments are made

Hmmm... I see what you're saying here. I speculate that things are working in the reverse. I think that the VB.NET team is very interested in how VFP does its thing...

I seriously doubt there wil be much difference in RAD ability at any point once you've mastered the syntax. I mean geez - we all know the classes are 90% of it.

I disagree. Namespaces are easier easier to deal with in VB.NET - the VFPToolkit demonstrates this well. And what about the tools that are provided? For example, tell me how to make a C# component interop with COM and to properly expose all the right GUIDs so it shows up in a COM client with all intellisense working. In VB.NET, I simply add an attribute to the class definition, check off the box in the project manager, and I'm done. In C#, it's a much more manual process (you have to define the GUIDs yourself, etc.) While this may not be an example that you can use, it does illustrate my point. They shouldn't make VB.NET language have access to things that C# language doesn't and vice-versa (that'd be really stupid). Instead, I see things like wizards and such to make VB.NET more RAD than C#. Again, all my speculation.

well - for one - I don't care that much about being "more like VFP" - the strength of VFP IMO has always been local cursors (data engine) and the wonderful, visual implementation inheritance -the language itself is overblown, convoluted, and inconsistent. Data engine is replaced by ADO in both cases and both now have IMP inheritance - so VFP similarity atthat point is mute to me.

Okay, fair enough. But I like flattening the learning curve as much as possible and for me VB.NET has been it. I could just as well have learned C#, though, so I can't make a strong argument here.

>>And I like how the VFPToolkit works under VB.NET better than C#, too. :)
>Again - I have no interst at all in that.

If you won't use it in a production app, don't you at least see it as useful in order to learn how to do things in .NET like string manipulation or accessing data? I think it's good sample code at the very least.