>Cecil,
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>Thanks... It was an NDA deal - but 7+ years later, I don't think the NDA police are going to care too much. Much of what was presented in those meetings has long since been replaced. Guys like Dan have a vested interest in spinning that event. Given the level of misrepresentation and the fraud he put forth, I had to correct the record.
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>As for Bill's response, it was clear and plain as day. Fox was not, is not, nor will it ever be part of MS's strategic focus. To understand what Bill meant, one needs to have a sense of the various market dynamics at play. Given the posts up here as of late, it is clear that many here who profess to have some knowledge on this...DON'T!!
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I think no VFP developper had thought that VFP would become the flagship product of Microsoft. It was squeezed between Access, VB and SQL Server. For me, it's was even a mystery that Microsoft continued the development of VFP. Now I have an explanation : there is a lot of succesful projects developed in VFP that will one day convert to SQL server, and it's where the money is for Microsoft I suppose.

>Here is the deal...techno-geeks tend to look at the world through code. Being at least part techno-geek, I can say this. You see this when people could not understand why people preferred VB over VFP - given that VFP had inheritence. This was a technical argument that fell on deaf ears. The great thing about VB is that it enabled people who heretofore - could not develop applications. The argument from the VFP camp was that they could not develop them well. This was a per se rule applied in the VFP world that was quite unfair. The fact is, quality applications could be developed in VB - and there were a number of supurb VB developers in the world. For too long, many in the VFP world rested on the fact that their tool had inheritance and because VB did not - not only was VFP superior - the VFP developer was superior by virture of their tool. The irony is that over the years - I have seen a lot of shlock VFP apps - that never employed a lick of OOP.
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It's true, I recently came accross a VFP application that was containing one the ugliest code I ever seen. It was not even good at procedural programming. And the guy proclaimed to be an expert in VFP ... :)
But I digress, I think you miss the point about VFP OOP. It's not that important that some VFP developpers don't use OOP. What OOP permitted, it's the development of good frameworks like Codemine, ProMatrix, Mere Mortals, and a bunch of other very good ones that made developping Data-centric applications really easy.

Secondly, the most important feature of VFP is its data-centrism. It's so easy to manipulate data with VFP. And while VB programmers lost time to learn new ways of manipulating data with each new VB version, VFP developpers builded applications.

>.NET is well suited to enterprise architecture - Fox is not.
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Well this really sounds like an ad. What doesn't it really mean "enterprise architecture" ? What kind of enterprise ? One size doesn't fit all. I understand that VFP is becoming old, but you can use it in the enterprise in many scenarios...