<< 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. >>

Yeah, but the big question is if this merger is going to include VFP. So far its tools remain entirely different from the rest of Visual Studio - and IMO, in most cases better - and the VFP IDE remains very different from the rest of the tools.

<< 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. >>

Don't you mean VB 6? At any rate, I really question whether we'll see this in VFP and if we do how well it'll deal with how VFP handles data vs. VB. Microsoft is pushing MDAC in all of the other tools in Studio, so it only makes sense that the report write will also use MDAC. MDAC works somewhat in VFP, but it leaves a lot to be desired and even if it all worked adopting it would mean quite a bit of rewriting for most VFP applications.