>I'll probably get flamed for this, but this is in the spirit of John Petersen's post at the VBPJ forum...
>
>Everyone points to VFP's OOP as superior to VB's object based approach. But what about VFP's lack of a full component based approach to development, something I've only seen personally in Borland products?
>
>Look at VFP's "Main Window", Report Writer, and Menu Designer. These are left-overs from FPW 2.6! VFP 5.0 should have dropped these and other unnecessary hold-overs from the past to attract new blood to the product.
>
>One can spend a lot of time going through various properties which indicate that they are for backward compatibility. How about giving us a fully component based VFP without all the luggage to support procedural coding practices from the past? Why would anyone want to convert an existing FPW 2.6 or FPD app to VFP? The forms look better in the older Fox versions...
>
>Let me get my fire suit on...

Microsoft's long-term plans are to merge development tools. I am *NOT* saying that there will be one language. Eventually the menu designer, form designer, report designer, etc. will be commonly shared among all the Visual Studio tools. Over the past several years we've seen a similar thing with Office. The Fox development team has publically stated that if you've asked for something and you haven't seen it in three versions, you're not likely to see it. Meaning, don't look for a new reports/menu designer. Given Microsoft's long term plans, this makes sense. It is rumored that VB 7.0 will have an integrated report writer (in other words, not Crystal Reports) and that the VB report writer will become the Visual Studio report writer sometime after that.