>With the introduction of .NET are we to assume that ActiveX will disappear? Will VFP8 allow the use of .NET components ?

ActiveX won't dissapear very quickly, but you can perceive right now a decrease in the number of new ActiveX controls being produced and released. Most vendors would keep updating their existent controls as long as the COM development market keeps demanding it, and I think this would happen at least for a couple years.

As for the use of .NET components from VFP, you can do it from any version of VFP trough COM Interop. You can take a look at this article in UT Magazine to have a general idea: Using .NET classes in Visual FoxPro

Of course, as more XML features are added to each version, it is easier to interact with .NET. VFP 7 added XmlToCursor and CursorToXml, VFP 8 added the XmlAdapter and CursorAdapter classes, thus making easier data exchange.

Hope this helps,