Cecil,

Well spoken.

I'm sure I am not the only VFP developer in this forum for whom this theme brings back painful memories of the early 90s. I am speaking of those poor wretches for whom Clipper was their "language of choice".

As loyal and fervent as VFP developers are, so too were Clipper devotees in their day. And just like VFP developers, Clipper programmers saw their kingdom begin to crumble and erode due to forces beyond their conrtrol.

Clipper had a huge following and massive 3rd-party support. But at the time when Nantucket should have been developing a Windows version of the Clipper, it was sold to Computer Associates who really didn't give a damn about the product. There it floundered until well past the time that it could have stayed a viable force in the industry. By the time CA finally released a Windows version (named Visual Objects), it was too late. The Clipper developers had already moved on to Visual Basic and FoxPro. Visual Objects became the red-headed stepchild of the xBase world.

Many Clipper programmers still wince in pain whenever the subject is mentioned. Clipper was truly a fine product. It was not its lack of technical prowess or functionality that killed the product, it was market forces and corporate mismanagement that sent it into obscurity.

I fear that a similar fate awaits VFP. Enthusiasm alone cannot sustain a product. We've seen that. As folks begin to abandon VFP, we will one day arrive at a critical mass and a sudden downward spiral that will trigger a mass exodus to .Net or some other safer haven. At that point, we will see no future releases of Visual Foxpro.

One cannot help but wonder if this has not been Microsoft's plan all along. When they tried to scuttle the product back in the mid 90s, the outcry was so loud and furious that they backed off. So they took another approach- slow and gradual dimishing of the product's importance until VFP developers themselves made the migration to another language of their own volition. (Why else would VFP have been dropped from Visual Studio and not brought into the .Net world.)

There is an anecdote (I don't know if it is true) that tells the story of a Visual Basic convention in the earlty nineties. A couple of Microsoft reps were asked who published Foxpro. They didn't know. But true or not, the fact that Microsoft is not interested in promoting VFP is clear.

Why would MS want to abondon VFP, a truly fine programming language? Think about it. A programmer can purchase a VFP license and write a thousand applications for a thousand different clients using that one license. And how much money does Microsoft make on this? Just the profit from the cost of the single VFP license.

But if there were no VFP, then each of those thousand clients would have to buy MS SQL. Now MS reaps big bucks from that programmer's efforts. VFP has provided small to medium sized businesses the luxury of deploying very adequate applications for virtually no cost except for developer salaries. VFP stands in the way of SQL's domination of the industry. At least Microsoft's share of the industry.

My two cents .....

-SK