Yes, databinding is a bummer. Most .NET devlopers had to fix it themselves. It will be better in Whidbey. I guess if you were a VB or C++ developer before, .NET databinding rocked, but from a VFP point of view, it sucks.

The SQL Server stuff does not bother me. That's just how SQL Server is, and I have the same issues when I use it in VFP, so nothing has changed there for me personally. But moving to SQL from VFP data is a whole other aspect, yes.

>> Your Milos approach sounds interesting, but please don't tease us with
>> vaporware. As you know VFP developers don't appreciate having our tool
>> deprecated because it undermines us in front of our customers.

I am not sure who came up with the nonsense that Milos is vapor ware. Milos is available, and applications based on Milos have been deployed for quite some time.

However, Milos is not for sale. We never said it would be. We only use Milos for the projects we do for our customers. So you could buy it, by buying our services, but you can not buy it as a stand alone product. It probably would not serve the typical developer well either. Milos is geared towards turning a 3 year project into a one year project. It is geared towards turning a 4 millions dollar project into a 2 million dollar project. Yes, it also works very well for small projects, but it is kind of like hitting a nail with a nuclear warhead.

Most average developers would not be happy with Milos, I don't think. For instance, Milos automatically protects against SQL injection attacks. Since the majority of commands that are sent to SQL Server are not SQL injection safe, Milos would automatically reject 95% of the commands sent to SQL Server. Probably a disappointing result for most developers. ;-) But if you are an enterprise SQL Administrator, you will love this functionality, since the most common form of attacking SQL Server has just been eliminated.

As I said: Milos works very well for smaller projects as well, but it only makes developers happy, if creating sophisticated projects (especially from a quality-pov) is what they want to do.

Of course, Milos also is a lot more than a framework. For instance, there are business specific extensions (such as facilities to store names, financial information, and many other common tasks). There also are a lot of integration components. Wanna integrate MS CRM? No problem. How about BizTalk Server or SharePoint? You got it. Features like Peoplesoft integration are on the drawing board as well.

So there is lots of stuff there, and it is not vapor-ware at all.

Markus