Fernando,

>He told me that next version of Delphi (version 8) will be dot net compliant BUT the Delphi developer will be (if he/she wants) able to develop her apps inside the Delphi environment (IDE) that he/she is very well used too.
>
>Can this be done with VFP? What are the major changes for the ordinary (standard) VFP developer?

All that's needed for a language to become a .NET language and still use its own IDE is its own compiler that can emit MSIL Intermediate code that is understood by the .NET framework. Of course, for error-checking in the compiler and other features like Intellisense, it must be aware of all the .NET classes and their syntax, so writing a .NET compiler for a language is not a simple task.

However, the big problem (as others have pointed out) is whether or not the .NET Framework supports the needs of the language being ported. In the case of VFP, most of the data-handling commands we know, love, and depend on do not have matching equivalents in the .NET Framework.

If you were working in your own IDE apart from the Visual Studio .NET IDE, you could, of course, still have a command window that could execute any commands, such as USE Table, BROWSE, etc.

If someone can solve the problem of automatically mapping record-based data commands over to client-server (CursorAdapter and XMLAdapter are interesting for this) and can write the compiler, it can be done, with the loss of a certain portion of the language.

Sounds like a fun weekend project. :-)