>Microsoft will support VFP 8.0 until 2010, and Europa for even longer.

That's great. We are, at my agency, starting to poke around for new dev tools (like .NET, maybe) for enterprise projects, as we are now throwing in the towel on Powerbuilder and Sybase as enterprise standards (assorted problems, and future pessimism). But we have a number of small and several medium-large, very well-running VFP systems that are some of our best, and we can't afford to rebuild these for years to come, while still struggling to get old mainframe systems into modern technology. This *is* the federal gov't <s>

So you can count on some continued need and purchases for VFP (and upgrades) for many years to come from us, no matter what else is going on.

.NET has been banned by IT brass here so far, due to the existing PB/Sybase/Java standards. But I think the door may be opening to .NET soon, with the demise of Powerbuilder now in-process, and Java is maybe gonna go to, from what I'm hearing (too many problems, again). And the smaller stuff will still go largely to VFP - overall, this plan is probably not terrible, something like the way you and MS would like to see things unfold, at a guess?

The one thing I can't help you on is MS SQL Server (yeah, I know, that's where the real $$ are) - the IT brass has already contracted very heavily with Oracle to replace Sybase as the Server DB backend standard (this is due to a mandate that we must diversify products at least a little, and we run almost all MS products already). Not my wish, but that's an area I have little input, I'm afraid. I prefer all-MS simply because the tools/DBs tend to be more compatible, but some of it (MS SQL Server) is not to be, at least not for quite some time.

But so long as .NET will work with Oracle well, as least there may be some progress at the devtool-level for enterprise here.