>>I have heard conflicting reports on this, and feel some of these (or similar) solutions still need time to mature. Since Linux is cranking up efforts to make a desktop presence I expect the tools/ide's will improve in functionality and ease of use over the next couple of years. This is why I just plan to hang with the fox until the future is clearer. We have already started investigating Linux for servers, and dabbled with OpenOffice. We are finishing up our upgrade to XP Pro on the desktop, still using MS Office XP, so we are good to go for 3-5 years; but it is unlikely that we will be looking to MS on our next upgrade cycle, which may mean moving to another programming platform. The main point is MS seem to think that I bought a couple of copies of VFP or MSDN and they are not making money, this is not true, I just bought 40 copies of XP Pro, 35 Copies of Office SB, and a win2000 NAS appliance. This is the real argument of why MS should keep VFP alive!
>
>Your point refers also to Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). It is IMO an important point, especially for low budget, small operations (e.g. Moms-and-Pops).
>
>.Net, a good-great-excellent product (pick whatever opinion you may have) is still geared towards the Enterprise. IMO it fails to cover the MomsNPops which are not going to invest in the hardware upgrades needed for .Net apps, not to mention SQL Server and at least a part-time DBA, plus the skilled .Net developer.
>
>Does MS have a ready-made tool to perfectly cover the medium and small size market? Yes. It is called VFP. Else they run the risk of losing that market to non-MS solutions.

Quite right Alex. I wonder just how many VFP apps are "out there"?