Bruce,

I sent this e-mail to Kevin McNeish just now:

Dear Kevin,

Thanks for the article "Visual FoxPro and .NET" in the August issue of FoxPro Advisor. I have a favor to ask on behalf of the FoxPro community.

Perhaps some (or all) of the features you mention could be incorporated into FoxPro without compromising FoxPro's strengths. To me, this stands out: you rate FoxPro's object orientation ("OO") features as "good" (only), while you rate the OO features of .NET languages as "great". Here is a list of desirable features that are not in FoxPro:

Object Oriented features
- abstract classes & methods
- interface inheritance
- overloaded methods, structures, enumerations
- custom events - static class members & attributes
- templates
- anonymous methods
- iterators
- partial types
- requirement to explicitly override parent method

Other features
- strong typing
- automatic resizing and positioning of controls
- easy to use menu builder
- complete control over the interface with GDI+

I realize that I may not have all of these exactly right; if so, I may not describe some correctly because I do not know what they are.

As you are one of the FoxPro community's leading OO experts, if you say the features above are good, then for my money, they must be good.

I wrote to Ken Levy, asking that he please make sure that each of features you mentioned is considered for inclusion on the FoxPro enhancement wish list. Ken wrote back (see below), indicating he is focused on the FoxPro "wish list" in Universal Thread ("UT").

Now that I think about it, Ken should be focused on the UT wish list. But I wonder whether OO was on any wish list of wide distribution prior to FoxPro version 3. Like many others in the FoxPro camp, I learned everything I know about OO in the context of FoxPro. The wish wish might be more focused on incremental enhancements that on revolutionary leaps.

I was hoping you could explain each of the features that you like in .NET in a way that would plug into the UT wish list. So the objective would be to explain each one in a way meaningful to FoxPro people. Then each of these features could be considered and "voted on" by the FoxPro crowd, and plug into Ken Levy's FoxPro upgrade priorities.

I would do this myself, but since I do not know what many of the features are, so my descriptions would not be good, and this would skew the wish list survey results AWAY FROM each of the features.

Thanks again for the FoxPro Advisor article.

Rick Graves
Hong Kong (displaced Seattle resident)