David,

I think we AGREE more than either of us realizes!

I just want to say, regarding OS/2. . . I was heavily (and I do mean heavily) into OS/2, mainly since release 2. I was on their BBS every day for over a year.
After WARP, IBM kept promising compatibility with Windows. They even promoted some tool they were going to deliver that would [they said] let you take the same source and compile it for either OS/2 or Windows **without changes** of any kind! When I stated on that board that that sounded like a pipe-dream (and I offered prior examples of similar pushes to back it up) I was soundly trashed by most.

But in the end, that "tool" never did materialize.

This unified development environment seems quite similar to me. It is such a neat idea, but nobody actually needs or wants it. This is more along the lines of MS satisfying themselves rather than satisfying their users' needs.

The IBM salesman of the old days was famous for always telling the customer just how good the NEXT release was going to be. MS is doing the same here.

Cheers,

Jim N

>>I don't know, but maybe you skip every second word when you read, or something???
>>
>>I *also* said, in the same response, that I was comfortable even if VFP died tomorrow.
>
>What I was addressing was that there was a tone of panic in your post at the consideration that Microsoft might kill Visual FoxPro, and while that tone may have come from not wanting to sit through a thread like that again (I wouldn't blame you, incidentally), I wanted it to be clear that the loss of VFP would not jeopardize my career and that I hoped that everyone else here was secure enough in their skills to be able to say the same thing.
>
>>And I didn't think I was knocking IBM. Yes, I used them as a prime example of unproductively PUSHING things aimed at changing the world (like PL/1, MSS units, IMS. etc in addition to OS/2) but which met resistance despite their best efforts. I feel that MS' direction for a "unified programming environment" is the same thing. We, the users and customers, don't really want that. It suits MS' purposes, but not ours.
>
>I don't know - I rather like OS/2 and PL/I. PL/I was my first exposure to data structures and pointers, which made the introduction to C much easier. And PL/I in the mainframe environment was being positioned as an alternative to ... COBOL??? I don't know about you, but given that choice,, I'd easily take PL/I.
>
>For me, the jury is still out on the "unified programming environment" until I see it - I suspect that Visual Studio is just a bundling, not the full implementation.