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Didn't you forget one small detail - that they are workING at adding VFP features to .NET.
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No...I think it is more accurate to say that they are adding some 'VFP-Like' features to .NET. That said, my basic premise is that from a performance standpoint (text) - .NET beats VFP. The VFP-Like features you are talking about have more to do with developer productivity in the gui.

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In other words it follows that, TODAY, .NET is inferior to VFP from a data handling point of view.
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No....that would be a logical fallacy on your part. What you are saying is that becuase .net is getting some VFP-Like features, it follows that .NET is therefore, inferior today to VFP. That is not sound reasoning. Is .NET superior to VFP? I don't know...but then again, I don't have to answer that question. What I do know is that .NET is NOT INFERIOR to VFP. And as you should agree, not inferior is not the same as superior. That is the problem with many of the arguments that are put forth up here. Things like "VFP is best at doing data" are pure nonsense - and logically flawed.

Lets remember too that the concepts of the VFP cursor made it into ADO 7 years ago. What did that mean for VFP? NOTHING. Indeed, Bill Vaughn at Tech-Ed Europe did give props to the Fox Team - but that was about it....

In the end, it is .NET that will be the tool that receives innovation - something more substantial than icons in a property sheet or the ability to rotate a label...<s>... And...assuming features were put into Fox to interact with .NET, who would really take advantage of the features? After all, if somebody is going to want to work with .NET...shouldn't they be using .NET in the first place? Case and point....web services. My guess is that 1 tenth of 1 percent of all Fox developers ever made serious use of that feature - which was really a feature of SOAP - not Fox.

It is interesting to watch where people try to hang their hat and claim victory.


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Agreed that it *may* outperform VFP in this arena ONCE IMPLEMENTED IN .NET. But who can say when that will be????
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Nonesense...take Steve Black's Anna Karenina text demo he does/did at various shows. .NET outperforms VFP TODAY. As for data-binding...that problem has been largely solved too - though interfaces. Unfortunately, the gui interfaces is a bit of a crutch for many. Manual data-binding is not that big of a deal. Unfortuantely, too many Fox'ers have been lulled into the whole drag/drop paradigm that many of them cannot think as to how the stuff really works (my primary beef with RV's).

Indeed, MS wants to make it easier for people to use their tools. This, IMO, is more of a marketing issue. The fact is, .NET - as is - is not that hard to use. The real software developers out there will likely eschew many of the automated ways MS will roll out - for the one main reason that usually, MS gets it wrong. When was the last time MS generated code was good????