>Quite frankly, that's why I take what you and other "FoxPro experts" say with a grain of salt. Once you get in that camp, you have to keep the behemoth happy or you won't be in that group anymore. And that kills the marketing and competitive advantages. The bottom line is that it behooves you to not be too critical of M$.

I guess you don't know us "FoxPro experts" very well!! We are hardly a bunch of "yes men" that say whatever Microsoft wants. We voice our opinions loud and clear and tell the Fox team exactly what we think and we tell them when we think they are wrong. And the Fox team does not discard us when we do!!

Case in point ... I worked on the Fox team as a contract in 2001. I *** STRONGLY *** pushed over and over again that the report writer needs some major improvements. I was told "We hardly ever use the report writer and we doubt our clients do either". As you can imagine ... I strongly disagreed with that statement. I responded by telling them of course you guys don't use the report writer .. you guys write FoxPro .. not business apps. Your clients, however, write business apps which require reports so *WE* clients use the report writer all the time. I did not let up on this point. I pushed every chance I could to get improvements to the report writer.

Well .. they finally listened and took what I said to heart because VFP 9 has major report writer improvements. In fact, during the development of the VFP 9 report enhancements they consulted with me for my opinion. I told them I disagreed with some things, specifically that they didn't even have a simple way to do conditional formatting. I thought it should be simple to make negative numbers red. I told them they wrong and making us use a report listener to pull that off was way too much work. They didn't listen at first .. but if you've seen any of the Sedna stuff .. you'll see they finally implemented a simple user interface to do conditional formatting.

So us "experts" are not yes-men .. and we say what we feel. And the great thing about the Fox team is that they (eventually) do listen and they do not harbor any ill will towards us for disagreeing with them. The people who work on the Fox team love the product just as much as we do. I have never worked with a more passionate group of people and I've been writing software for 25 years now!