Hi Ed,

I'm a guy that has alot of time, energy, and money investmented in VFP, relatively speaking. I am looking for ways to protect my investment in VFP. The advent of Dot Net seem to be eroding the value the market once placed on VFP as a platform of choice for data intensive applications that could be quickly developed and easily distributed.

Since VFP is win32 dependent, wouldn't this present a problem if Windows evolved into a Dot Net specific OS. This begs the question whether 1) VFP would be rewritten to run natively in a Dot Net OS, even though it may not participate in Dot Net CLR, 2) would VFP be provided a win32 emulation layer on which its win32 apps could be run, or 3) would VFP not be ported to Dot Net and just fade away.

I know that as OS system change they go through transation periods until the transition is completed. For example, Window originally ran on a 16 bit platform. When windows was moved to a 32 bit platform to take advantage of 32 bit hardware, C and C++ had to be rewritten to accommodate both 16 bit and 32 bit code. The window's OS, as well as all other applications, had to be re-compiled before they could run on the 32 bit hardware. Eventually, windows became a true 32 bit OS and 16 bit software would no longer run under windows.

What do you see as the best alternative for VFP and what could we do as a community to needle Microsoft in that direction. I personal would like to see a native Dot Net port of VFP with VFP fully participating in the underlying Dot Net foundation, classes, etc. Is this possible?