Kevin,

>There is a widely held view that VFP has been in decline for a long time, and its future is surely in doubt. That is certainly my impression, but I know there are some who disagree...
>
>I just don't get it.

As I said, I'm not going to argue the point. Suffice it to say that I think you are in the minority, and to paraphrase Jess, your head is in the sand.

>
>1.) When you say "widely held view" do you mean, active VFP users, management, Gartner Group, general public?
>

All of the above, to the extent they've even heard of VFP.

>
>2.) When you say "in decline" do you mean technologically speaking, # of application, MS sales, # of programmers??
>

None of the above, to my personal knowledge. As for the job market, this was most definitely the case, even before the .COM implosion. At this point, its pretty tough to separate the background noise level from the trend that was already evident. It may well be that, relatively speaking, the VFP job market has fared no worse or even slightly better than the rest of the IT sector since its total collapse. But I don't see any basis for optimism about the chances of a healthy recovery in the face of Microsoft's non-marketing plans for VFP.

>As far as I can tell VFP in conjuction with frameworks or webConnection has the potential (and the realization) to make quite a nice living for the next few years. The fact that MS is pushing NET hard and not pushing VFP that hard just means that MS envisions more profitability from .NET (and a bunch of other products) than it does from VFP -- no more no less.
>

To say that MS is "not pushing VFP that hard" has got to be the understatement of the year. I dispute the contention that this is due to VFP's unmarketability or inability to generate profits for Microsoft. Therein lies my point: VFP is in decline because Microsoft chooses not to market it, not the other way around. This is as a classic example of the effect of Microsoft's deliberate, monopolistic market manipulations. You seem to accept what I regard as a transparent, fictitious reversal of cause and effect. I see it as an outrageous abuse that does serious harm to the entire FoxPro community. The irony is that this behavior is not even in Microsoft's own self interest.

>However, it seems that VFP is still in MS's game plan for the near foresable future. Why? Probably because it is a great product, has a great MS team and has a fanatical user base. That is pretty good. I will learn NET in the meantime and if MS dumps VFP I'll be ready.
>
>Kevin

Since when is any part of the future foreseeable? Good luck with .NET! As for myself, I'll stick with VFP as long as I can. If MS decides to make things even more difficult, I'll give serious thought to changing professions. Say, political commentary... ;-)

Mike