At the root of all this "need" for Fox periodicals and publications id the absolute poor quality of the VFP documentation! There would hardly be a need for any of the 'suppot' facilities you named *IF* the documentation did the job that proper documentation IS SUPPOSED TO DO.

Some proofs that the documentation is severely wanting is:

1) Look at how many "How to. . ." articles are published in the MS KB.
- and they are all basically poorly done, too
2) Look at how many "problems" are answered as "working as designed. . . in the MS KB.
- If the documentation did the job it is supposed to, *NONE* of these would even come up as "problems"
3) The existence of thick and expensive books on VFP
- There are fewer in light of publishers' perception that VFP is on the MS kill list, and I'm sure the writers appreciate the income, but they should not NEED to exist
4) The existence of FoxPro Advisor and FoxTalk
5) The existence of UT and MS Newsgroup for VFP and other places, not the least of which are sites maintained by loyal and knowledgeable FP/VFP adherents.

None of the above is actually "normal" - you didn't see such for COBOL or FORTRAN or PL/1 or ASSEMBLER or the other older languages. Yet, for reasons beyond me, we permit it for *many* MS products (specifically).

You'll get lots of people who say the documentation for VFP is adequate. I was close to in that camp once, when I really got a kick out of trying various permutations and combinations of commands to beat a certain problem or devise some workaround for something which didn't work right. Then I realized that this was costing me LOTS of my time, and I began to resent very much doing theis kind of UNNECESSARY work.

I read all documentation voraciously. In the case of VFP the argument can sometimes be accurately made that "its in there somewhere" Well, that's about as useful as screen doors on a submarine - if you can't find it where you expect to find it( in the Help), then it might just as well not be there.

VFP 6.0 is said to be aimed squarely at the novice. They had better have done a vast improvement on the Help, or the other effort will got for naught.

Jim,

When I first purchased VFP3, and got the ONE book on programming I actually called M$ to find out how to get the rest of the documentation -- I KNEW this could not be all of it. It is not only not adequate, it is very poor -- but typical of M$ documentation. Check out the 11 books that come with Computer Associates' Visual Objects (still not the greatest, though).

It used to be that the Advisor series of mags was sort of general information and Pinnacle's pubs were for the advanced technical users. I'm glad to see this distinction is blurring a bit. Advisor is better -- Fox Talk is still good, but no where near the quality of the old, Nantucket era Reference(Clipper), for example.

Bottom line is that we Fox people are going to get exactly what we demand -- from MicroSoft or whoever. Since we control the pursestrings, we control what we will buy. If we are satisfied with poor quality -- that's all we will get. I don't subscribe to Advisor anymore. I tried earlier this year, but decided after a while that it was not worth the trouble -- after three attempts, I never did quite get a subscription started. I guess the little 80-year old guy constituting the entire subscription department was somewhat overwhelmed. Now I read it at the local university library. I figure Advisor must not need my subscription as they made no particular effort to get it. Come to think of it, it took three tries to start my latest subscription to FoxTalk, then they billed me for it twice at two different rates. But this really is unconscionable. One would think that the one thing a technical journal would be superb at would be getting subscriptions started -- its their bread a butter. If they're not very good at starting a subscription, I assume they are also very poor at everything else.

But now I'm digressing,

good comments, Jim.

regards,