Jordan,

VFP is not a strategic product for MS and, therefore, any official support will be "iffy". The way this worked is that Grigore managed to line up sponsors to foot the bills. So we didn't have to ask MS for much.

A full conference is probably out of the question, but I think Grigore has pioneered a model where 1 or 2 experts from the U.S. could speak in Romania, Bulgaria, or wherever.

Again, I urge you and Venelina to email me and let's find a way to get U.S. speakers to Bulgaria.


>Yes you are correct. In most of less developed countries there is huge amount of programmers, which couldn't afford to pay $1000 to participate in conferences like Frankfurt DevCon.
>I think that Microsoft should spend part of it marketing budget for that kind of events. I know they did this in some countries.
>The problem is that they spent it, but for .Net events(every year in the end of june there is 2 days .Net/SQL conference in Sofia. Last year Ken talk about XAML and around 1000 atendees listened him). I suppose that with 1/10 of the bugget(I am familiar how much MS BG spent) for this conference could be done the similar for VFP programmers, but there is not interest. Romania is 3 times larger market than Bulgaria and FoxPro is more popular.
>My question is - Will MS Romania spend tiny part of their budget for that kind of conference. If yes I know at least 3-4 Romanians which could be lecturers with their good knowledge in VFP, they need small traning to not worry when they present notes. 2-3 europen lectures(Igor(CZ), Chetin(TR), Venelina(BG), etc. ) and 1-2 american could make the conference. Other will depend on organization abilities of Grigore to atract as many as possible attendees and to make good set of sessions.