The VFP Road Map ... and a community reading between the lines

The VFP road map came out the other day. http://msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro/roadmap/ I've been trying to gather my thoughts about it. The VFP community is busy looking at what has been written and quickly starting analyzing the space in between the words, and then the space in between the letters.

To quote Freud: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

It's pretty clear. No VFP 10.

I know that Ken Levy is trying his darnest to make it very clear about Microsoft's intentions but ... compare these two sentence fragments from a recent UT posting:

As of now, all of our plans for enhancing VFP in the future are contained in the VFP Roadmap document and nothing should be assumed or planned for beyond that. ... while still enhancing VFP.

Funny. Are they enhancing VFP or not? What does "enhancing" mean?

For my part, I'm looking at VFP 9 as the last version. Anything else (service packs / Sedna) is just gravy but certainly won't be anything revolutionary, not even evolutionary. Sounds just like patches to me.

I continue my quest to determine which technologies to focus on. Right now, I'm scattered to the wind. I need to find some focus to get proficient enough with some type of technology for someone to pay me for what I'm doing.

I'm still considering creating a framework based on OpenLaszlo where a VFP application will recurse through a VFP form object and spit out a lzo.swf file that can be posted onto a web site. Kinda like Rick's DHTML class did in WWWC. I'd want it to work with some sort of data request object too so that it is more of a turn-key solution. (Design the form in VFP and make it work using the VFP based OpenLaszlo classes that I create, then feed it through a lzo.swf generator program also written in VFP.) It sounds like a great topic for a FoxTalk article. OpenLaszlo certainly has the "WOW" factor that people will pay for.

Of course Real Basic looks good too. They were rumored to come out with a Linux IDE sometime this year. We'll see.

Back to work using VFP 9.0. It will continue to pay my bills for quite some time.