Craig,
>I'm with Sergey on this one. .NET will definately get more data handling characteristics that are similar to VFP. There's a good reason for that. VFP does data best and the VS Data Tools team works closely with the VFP team. They have the same boss (yag).
At a .NET Partner's Strategy conference I attended last year in Redmond (while still with CoDe Magazine), there was a presentation by a product manager-type person about the road map for upcoming versions of Visual Studio.
At one point, there was a comment about data handling and the presenter mentioned that the VS development teams were talking to the VFP team. He then said something like this, "If anyone knows how to do data, the Fox guys do."
It will be interesting to see what develops in future versions of VS.NET related to local data.