>>I am currently attending Microsoft's Tech-Ed 98 Conference in New Orleans and from what I've seen, here are some conclusions I've reached:
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>>1. Most of the presentations used/referred to VB or MS Access.
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>>2. Out of hundreds of presentations, approximately 3 involved VFP.
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>>3. Now for some real meat.
>>a. There was a session entitled 8-212 Choose The Right Tool for the Job presented by Peter Wilson, Program Manager of the Visual Studio Enterprise Edition.
>>b. The presentation featured VB, Visual C++, Visual Interdev and Visual J++. One of the PP slides stated 'Development tools are increasingly powerful and overlapping'. VFP was not listed.
>>c. The roles of VB, VC++, Visual Interdev and VJ++ were mentioned. VFP was not.
>>d. Under 'Developer Tool Strengths', the 4 above tools were mentioned. VFP was not.
>>e. Under 'Language considerations' which listed tools ranging from Ease of Use to Power, VFP was not included.
>>4. Have you seen the MS ad 'Where do you want to go today?'. I think the answer is VB.
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>>Although Microsoft has put a lot of effort into improving VFP, is releasing version 6 and working on the next version, it seems that the only reason is to appease the VFP developers. From a strategic point of view, VFP is not in.
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>>We've all seen responses from Microsoft stating that VFP is a key part of their strategy. If this is the case then why don't they put their money where their mouth is and expose VFP to the entire development community in the same manner as they do with VB?
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>>What do you think?
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>>Mario DeMello
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>Mario,
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>Please send your remarks to foxmktg@microsoft.com. I'd be interested hear what Robert tells you in his reply.

I'm here at Tech Ed also, and spoke with Robert, Randy Brown and Ken Levy about this just yesterday. They were not happy about it and I'm sure will be discussing it with someone in management. We also discussed what I call the Fox teams "stealth marketing" of VFP at Tech Ed. Ken Levy will be giving a session today on moving your apps to three tier and will give a bunch of people a look at VFP who wouldn't normally look at it. The fact that the course title doesn't have any mention of Fox will cause many VB developers to possibly take a look. Also, George Goley will be speaking here tomorrow on "Building the Best Visual Studio Database Applications." You can bet he will be talking Fox and VB. I think you can look for more of this type marketing from the Foxteam.

I also sent an email to the clown that gave the "Choosing the right tool" session. I told him he was neglecting a very strong piece of VS and his course title was misleading. I also told him that if VFP was "mission critical" enough for the DOD to develop a defense logistics system for Desert Storm, it surely would handle most businesses needs.

As for this whole deal about the continued existence of Fox, I think it will be merged into VB within the next 5 years. If you think about it, they started moving us to VB-like coding with version 3. Much of the coding of VB and VFP now has a very familiar feel anyway. This is not necessarily a bad thing though. I jumped ship on dBase when FoxBase came out because it was twice as fast. If I can use a product that evolves from Fox and gives me more power, what do I care if they call it Visual Widget Builder, VB, or anything else. I'm slowly starting to learn VB, VJ++, VI and all this other stuff that causes me to only get about 4 hours sleep a night.

John Harvey