Hi John,

Speaking as a developer with 25+ years experience and a former VFP team member at MS, I have to agree with Fred - the camaraderie of the VFP community is something special...in fact, so special that MS tries to find ways to build dev comminities with their other products using the VFP community as a model.

Every single "elite" member of the VFP world has contributed code and concepts to the VFP community gratis. There's an old running joke that when a VFPer finds a new trick he immediately shares it with all but a VBer immediately forms a company and sells it.

Sure, there are individuals within every developer clan that are social and fun to hang out with. But the Fox world is truly unique in that all of them are socialable and all of them will bare their coding souls for you. When and if this community flames out, it will be a sad day for thousands of developers.


>>Nowhere, and I repeat, nowhere else will you find the camaraderie and community that exists in the VFP world.
>
>
>Uh huh. I have found many friends at the .net user groups/events/code camps i've attended. We meet for drinks, we meet all the time, outside the meetings, for dinner. You must not get out much to make that kind of a statement. Good friendly people exist all over the world, and you're right, its the pople that make the community.
>
>The developer community puts on the code camps, everyone is volunteers. I know that a few of the big names, do donate for user groups and I've heard them speak. When is the last time you saw any of the speakers in the VFP Community donate their time to the conferences? Can I get code/ppt's of the conference addresses? Can I attend for free? You can go to the code camp pages and download all of the code for free.
>
>Free code camps take the profit motive out of the equation, which leaves the dissemination of information. There were no vendors hawking their wares, nobody selling magazines or frameworks, etc, only presentations chock full of code and expertise.
>
>You can be wary, it makes no difference to me, but there is a whole lot to developing life outside the VFP world. The people are the same, the cameraderie is the same and the friendships are the same.