>Can I suggest another reason why DBF died? Because there's no money to make with it. I mean I buy VFP and that's it. MS makes no money after that. I do as many apps as I please and MS receives nothing from that.

No doubt some of that is true. On the other Enterprise developemnet demands a SQL backend so really if that's what your marketing to it doesn't make a huge difference whether DBF support is there or not. For smaller operations sure - the DBF maybe easier and cheaper for a small company, but in those situations you might actually loose a sale BECAUSE of the licensing requirements for SQL server.

Development tools in general are a one time investment though. VS.NET you pay for once the same way and you pay roughly the same thing for the Professional version. For data access a third party tool like VistaDb can be used for the same sort of royalty free data access. The options are there... whether they're used is another story though.