Hi Mark

While I like the idea of removing the backward compatible stuff from VFP I do not agree that I am doing my customers a huge dis-service by allowing them to continue to use old version of FoxPro.

For a number of clients there is no business justification for change. The application they use meets their business need. Their work has not changed significantly nor is it likely in the next few years. So how can they justify the expense of upgrading and retraining employees when the new application will do exactly what the previous one did only using newer software.

This is a growing problem in the software business. For example,Word 97 more than meets my needs. This is true for many software packages. So why go through the agravation of learning a new interface only to do what I did in the old version. Not to mention that fact that every upgrade has the potential of breaking (and usually does in my experience) some other software.

I personally will be upgrading to VFP8 but my customers may continue using older versions until it makes business sense to do otherwise.

Simon




>You can always use earlier versions of VFP even if you buy the upgrade version. You can have versions 6, 7 and 8 on your development machine with no problems as long as they are installed in different locations. Do the third party tool vendors offer newer versions that work with current versions and also backward compatible?
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>Personally, I would like to see the VFP team start phasing out all of the FP 2.x and earlier "Included for Backward Compatibility" features. If developers have not upgraded these features in VFP apps by now, then they are doing a huge dis-service to their customers and to themselves.
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>>Here's the stupid thing that I did. I upgraded to VFP7 even if I did'nt really needed it. It was my contribution to the community.
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>>I upgraded to VFP 7 but I still develop things with VFP6 because apparently I can still do that. At the moment I use VFP7 because of its intellisense but compile in VFP6. So it's the best of both worlds.
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>>Now with VFP 8 it's another ball game. Upgrading to VFP8 means that development with lower versions must stop.
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>>I bought some cool third party tools that allow me to build nice applications with VFP6. But with VFP7 I have some problems. So for now it's not too bad because I can still use VFP6.
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>>So if I have problems with these third party tools with VFP7 I don't see why I would'nt have the same problems with VFP8.
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>>But the catch is that I can't upgrade to VFP8 because I don't know if I'll have problems with those tools. And If I upgrade to VFP8 and have problems with those tools I can't go back to VFP6. Sure I could remove VFP8 (or can I from a legal point of view because at that point I upgraded to VFP8) and stay with VFP 7 or 6 or others below. But after losing some dollars doing the VFP8 test.
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>>Is it only me or is there something weird with that decision by MS to do that?