James;

Can you believe we saw a real Fox in Cupertino, about 1/4 mile from our house at about 11 PM one evening! This is Silicon Valley so that was a neat experience! :)

Excuse the following:

There are lots of “horse people” on both sides of my family.

A story about a Fox.

My cousin “Bunny” (his nickname) was the number one Archer in California in 1958, target shooting. We were at my uncle’s ranch that summer to buck bails and other things. There is always something to do on a ranch! Just after dinner one evening, Bunny told a funny story about a Fox Hunt.

It seems an American chap from the “wild west” was invited by his British cousin to go on a Fox Hunt. The American was not at all versed in such outings so tried his best at doing what came naturally. After the Hunt was over the participants met at a local home for refreshments. The topic of the American and his behavior during the Hunt came up.

The British cousin told his American relative the following; “You did splendidly! However, next time you are on a Hunt, you should yell, “Tally ho”, and not yell, “There goes the son of a bitch”!

We cracked up, and then “Bunny”, his son David and I went bow hunting for jackrabbits! We were in the field, from which we had removed the bails of alfalfa, which was about 150 acres. “Bunny” had a calling device, which sounded like a mad Sea Gull, which he used for about 2 hours until we finally attracted one lone jackrabbit! We were tired and ready to let “Bunny” have the first shot. Everyone was quiet, as we did not want to scare the rabbit! Bow drawn with a broad head arrow aimed at the rabbit, we knew the rabbit had no chance. Our effort had paid off!

Suddenly, my uncle came charging on his black horse, lasso over head, with all the dogs running towards us and barking! Uncle Frank was yelling “Tally Ho, catch the son of a bitch”! We were frozen with laughter, and the rabbit ran off to safety! What also added to the laughter was uncle Frank’s horses name was Tally”! :)


Tom


>Thank you, Kevin,
>
>Per usual, your comments are well thought out. I've been in a quandary for quite some time over the future of VFP. I am not married to the language, nor do I see the need to jump into .NET in my current situation, but down the road I know will be more difficult times for the Fox.
>
>I grew up on a horse farm in New Jersey. All my sisters have been blooded after having participated in their first fox hunt. Thankfully that barbaric tradition has been discarded--they now let the fox go after catching it--and in some places fox hunts are banned altogether. Now I’m starting to identify more and more with the poor fox!
>
>>Jim,
>>
>>>I am not the only one with these concerns. Several MM developers e-mailed me in private after my post. One of them said I have some very big balls, even if my post was well written. Some of these developers have completely built their vertical-market products on your framework. For a few of them, rewritting their applications in .NET just doesn't make sence. For others it does.
>>
>>I agree...you don't even see Microsoft rushing to rewrite all of their unmanaged applications in .NET. It's a huge undertaking. However, if a developer were creating a new app or was doing major rework to an existing app, then I would strongly recommend looking at .NET.
>>
>>>My new job, scheduled to begin next month, has no need for a distributed application or a large thin client. What the company needs is a rock-solid windows application built with a good RAD tool--Visual Foxpro.
>>
>>I agree that Visual FoxPro is all that, but you can build the same types of Windows desktop applications in .NET right now...some things are harder in .NET but many things are easier. My main point here is that as time goes by and Microsoft continues to spend tremendous amounts of resources on .NET (and very little on FoxPro), the gap will widen and there's no way that Fox can keep up forever. That's why I recommend that Fox developers creating new projects think *very* seriously about .NET. That said, you don't have to throw out the Fox! You can still incorporate elements of FoxPro in your .NET applications where it makes sense.
>>
>>>That said, when do you think your next version will be released? Can you give us a list of any new enhancements you are thinking of including, aside from the cursor adaptor class?
>>
>>We're not announcing a release timeframe at this point, but I will give you a list of some of the majory enhancements:
>>
>>* Implementing structured error handling
>>* Integration of CursorAdapter with our data access classes
>>* Use of new collection classes
>>* Use of the Empty class where it makes sense
>>* Use of Event Binding
>>
>>When you think about it, we automatically inherit many of the other enhancements to VFP8. Many developers are using our current version (7.1) of MM VFP with VFP8 and are already using some of these new features.
>>
>>Regards,