>Blaming it all on the marketing is way too easy I think. Sure, MS could have done more, but I also wonder if this would have made a big difference. The Fox is old, and in IT world, old often gets labeled as not interesting, 'outdated' etc.

C, Basic is older than fox but not labeled as outdated. And there is now C# which is also considered an evolution of C. Is it labeled as outdated? No.
If there is Fox# and MS market it well then it will not labeled as outdated. As I have said, Netware is a superb product but Novell has lousy marketing and so, where is Netware now?

>I don't buy that. I still have to see that .NET 2 or 3 will arive or it will be transformed into another new development environment with even better promises. How compatible will .NET be with it successors ? To me the future of VFP is just as unclear as any development environment.

We should be alerted enough and see if there are clouds out there which are obvious signs that it will rain. Of all MS dev tools, Fox has the most unclear future. It's in the I.C.U.. The doctors (fox team) are trying their best for it to live at least even longer...

>Though one thing is clear for me: in the next 5 years VFP is going to be dead. Why ? There are simply to many application running on FOX. Do you have any idea how much effort it will take to convert all existing VFP application into another development environment ?

I can't understand you on this one.

>I don't think so. the FOX was about DOS and Windows, not the MAC. I think you can't draw any conclusions from that.

>>And so it needs miracle for it to bounce back and it will not happen if MS is not interested on it at all. Making VFP to be the front end of SQL Server is another puzzle to me. Can the VFP Team surpass how integrated SQL Server with .NET is?
>
>AFAIK, future versions will get a better SQL-server integration than VFP 7. How it will compare to .NET I don't know, but I'm sure the VFP team won't get away with a half backed solution. So I guess it will be done properly.

Assuming VFP gets better integration than .NET languages, will MS market it that way? If so, then good enough, but I doubt it will.

>Can you point out a development language that has such strong OOP capability. Not only in programming, but also in visual aspects ? Can you point out a development environment that compiles a 2 Meg application in about 1 or two seconds. Which environment has the maximum control about data ? Which one has the richest DML ? Which one has the best runtime evaluation (macro substition) and compile (programs and database) in runtime ? Which one is easy to install and has virtual no problems with different versions or dependencies? Which language has such a rich variety of commercial frameworks?

It's VFP because I am a VFPer, but try to talk to a proficient delphi or vb programmer, they don't believe you.

>Last but not least: Which developer tool has such a great community and meeting place like the UT here ?

No doubt about it, it's VFP community. That's why MS is now concentrating on communities. But no matter how strong our community, MS is not changing its mind in handling VFP.