>> the product manager for VFP can only recommend a book that shows a VFP programmer how to transition to the latest MS vision <<

To clarify, I recommend many VFP books. In no way is the upcoming .NET book for VFP Developers by Kevin McNeish the only book I have or will recommend. I held up lots of new great VFP books from Hentzenwerke.com in the EssentialFox keynote a few months ago. There is no strategy about transitioning VFP developers to .NET by Microsoft and any summary like that is simply falsely fabricated.

What is happening, and will continue to occur, is that the message will be that VFP 8.0 is a great upgrade for VFP developers, that VS .NET (especially ASP.NET) works great "with" VFP (as a web development tool for VFP COM, XML Web services, or OLE DB data access to DBFs), and that SQL Server 2000 is a great data store for VFP middle tier and smart client (desktop) applications. And if you need more than one of those applications to develop with, MSDN Subscriptions is a great way of getting all of those tools (most MSDN Subscription customers including VFP developers are very satisfied with MSDN Subscriptions).

More and more VFP developers are learning and using VS .NET, mostly with VFP in some way. We will certainly encourage others to do this and VFP 8.0 will contain great new features from the Wish List, core VFP related enhancements, better .NET support and better SQL Server support. For those VFP developers learning and using .NET and SQL Server, we will continue to do things and provide information, tools, etc. to help those VFP developers succeed.