You are correct that Robert, Dave Lazar and the rest of the Fox team would very much like to keep VFP alive, see more resources devoted to it and have it recieve equal billing with the rest of the tools in Visual Studio. They also care a great deal about the community and revel in the success of the community. Collectively the Fox team at MS is a great group of people and they take great pride in their work. There obviously somewhat of a renegade group and I'm certain they take great pride in the fact that 10% of VS owners are using VFP despite everything else that's going on around it. But in reality, this stuff is perhaps more disturbing than anything else. It seems obvious that no matter how well the Fox team fares their biggest obstacles to achieving a higher level of success come from within their own organization. Janet Walker, the former product manager at Fox Software, is a program manager or product manager for VS (I'm not sure which one) and Chris Williams, one of the most talented developers we had at Fox and probably the most overall talented individual I've ever met, is Director of Development, with one person between him & Bill Gates. All of this leads me to believe that the direction of VFP is coming from none other than Bill G himself. I suspect the reasoning behind all of it is much more personal and ego based than anything else and I've heard numerous rumors that I won't repeat here to support that. If that's the case, how do you combat that?
As far as allowing us to dictate the features that go into VFP and for MS to commit to delivery dates, before that could ever happen the company - not just the Fox team - would have to make a real commitment to the product, which from the above, you can see that I personally don't see happening. Even if it did, what you're really talking about doing is turning VFP into a consulting project with the whole VFP community as the client, which IMO would be suicide for MS and the Fox team.
I think the goal is to migrate us to VB and I also think that for the most part, MS realizes VB isn't there yet and in the meantime the VFP team is doing what it can to continue to raise the bar for VB.
Also, while I think ADO is great and shows a lot of promise for the future, what's it tell you when a team with a product to get out and a user community that's always hungry for more is assigned the job of taking something from there product that has always given their product a decided edge and making it available to VB and all of the other MS products?
