Markus,

I too love VFP Weaktyping but eventually 2-3 years from now won't COM be fading out of M$ radar. By this I mean more stuff will be available for .net programs and not for us (I am not doomsaying but causes me to wonder) and I'm not even sure I should care ?

My question is not making VFP a .net language but running it like "Excel" a language written in .net or better running on .net just like we have today.

Word, Excel are programs that will run ? on .net but how can they be strong typed????

jp


>>If everything would look just like VB.NET, what's up with C# and C++ and Delphi -- none of which are exactly like VB.NET.
>>Seems like .NET itself could be expanded to handle FP's query and data manipulation language. I mean why not if it's supposed to be so much better?
>>Quite frankly I'm willing to deal with the language changes if the end result is the ability to use the .net framework stuff. Plus you have to wonder how good a framework .NET is if it requires a complete language redesign to use it...
>>I still haven't quite got a handle on how it was determined that 'most' vfp developers didn't want this to happen because based on what I've gathered 'most' vfp developers seem to think that MS made a major blunder by excluding VFP from .NET.
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>You don't understand my point. The VFP language draws its power from being weakly typed. Other languages that have been ported to .NET are strongly typed. You couldn't compile the DML strongly typed, because statements such as
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>Customer.Name
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>can not be typed at compile time. In fact, this could change after compilation. So this would never work.
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>VFPs great strength is that one can do things extremely quickly because the typing limitations aren't there. Unfortunately, this is also the #1 cause for bugs in enterprise-size software written in VFP.
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>A VFP language could still be different from VB.NET. So while VB.NET would say:
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>DIM oForm as new Form()
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>VFP could say
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>LOCAL oForm as new Form()
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>But that difference would be so marginal that I'd consider it the same.
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>Of course, we could also make the decision to make it more like C#:
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>Form oForm = new Form();
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>But that would be quite far removed from VFP syntax. My point is that the minimum changes to the language that would be required would be very similar to what VB.NET is like, which is mostly a coincidence.
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>And quite frankly: The statement that .NET is no good because completely different languages can't be turned into it without being redesigned is like saying airplanes are no good because you can't get cars to fly. Both have to do with transportation, but are so different, the statement just doesn't make sense. Sure, you can probably modify cars so much that they can fly, but ultimately, you'd have to be a pilot to operate them.
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>Markus