Hi, Jim.

Let me jump in here to see if I can make some points clear about this issue. The idea Ken presented to the community is not wether VFP should have a way to interact with .NET or not. What he asked about was how useful could be a mechanism to instance some .NET classes from VFP.

At first it seemed a nice idea to me, but as Ken went on explaining what was all about, I quickly lost interest in this. Of course, people whith little or no exposure to .NET can't provide valuable feedback here, as this is something between two approaches you need to understand.

Basically, you CAN interop with .NET today, by just creating a callable wrapper around .NET assemblies (DLLs), so you can use them as if they were regular COM components.

What the Team was playing with was a generic device so you can instantiate some .NET classes from VFP. Of course, you wouldn't be doing exactly that, but instantiating the classes over a generic COM wrapper.

But what's the problem here, as clearly stated by Rick in this thread? The main problem is that even while you could instantiate, say, and ADO.NET dataset, the means to use it from VFP are not there, and you wouldn't even have full Intellisense over your COM component.

Instead, if you need a good level of interoperability, you can build a simple or complex component on .NET, provide an appropiate interface so it is easily used from VFP, and create a COM wrapper. This is something you can do TODAY (and indeed, you can do it since about two years ago).

The toolkit Ken propossed is -at least as presented- not something that would make easier for VFP developers to interact with .NET, but indeed more difficult. To use .NET Framework classes you need to learn .NET. but using them this way is much harder than using them inside Visual Studio .NET, and once you got something working, making it accesible from COM/VFP is just a snap. This is the easiest part.

Again, if the team doesn't go forward with this project, you'll be loosing nothing but a clever idea. I guess this is kind of "an interesting solution looking for a problem". But the problem was not there. Ken would correct me if I'm wrong.

Hope this helped clarify the issue, rather than contributing to the confusion.

Regards,