>>Off the record, I've noticed MS employees haven't taken an interest in these posts, and if you were looking from an outsider's perspective, you would say that was a bad thing (for VFP)!
>
>Lots of cool and exciting annoucements to be made by Microsoft at DevCon in the keynote on Sept 29th. What do you want to know, or more to the point, what are you expecting?

Ken,

From my point of view, which is that of a small developer in a small market, it is not "rentable" (spanish word meaning profitable) for me to invest in becoming an expert in many tools. The issue is that learning is a significant cost. It is OK to learn many things as long as the time spent is rewarded. Often that means learning enough to write or copy a routine in another language yet call it from the language in which I am most proficient. It is a "return on investment" issue, as I told somebody else today.

The things I like about Fox are:
1) With one learning investment I can accomplish a lot of different things;
2) I don't have to spend my money to help someone else finish their product (I mean .NET);
3) Since I write an application package, I like it that I can ship it without sharing my customer's precious money, which is scarce, for runtime fees;
4) Since I am gradually moving to SQL Server I like the fact that I can do that yet not become locked to it because some of my customers cannot afford it.

So... what I would like to hear at the keynote on Sept 29, and in Milwaukee in November, is that VFP continues to allow me to do what I need: Namely, to produce applications that don't require me to spend money I don't have, that can run against SQL Server if my customers are large enough or MSDE if they are not, and that allows me to do the lastest thing, in other words to stay in the game.

I'd also like to hear that that MS has made it easier to train people to use VFP. That means I like the discoverability I heard you talking about and other introductory tools. Also, I would like not to be left out of anything potentially important, such as net services (I am aware that VFP7 allows that easily). Last but not least I'd like to hear that inside MS there are still people that love this language, which is a work of art in my opinion.

Ken, I know you are not a magician, but that is what I'd like.

Alex