Interesting analysis. Personally, I think one of the comments you made kind of has something to do with the fate of VFP. The one about "VFP developers are notoriously pennywise and pound foolish about paying for 3rd party stuff". I think there are several reasons for this.

One, the nature of the Fox developer. Usually a sole proprietor. In many cases, happy he can do what he considers enough with Fox out of the box. Even thou there are many discussions in this forum about Activex addons, as has been mentioned many times, I think only a very small percentage of Fox developers ever sought out sources such as this for help in improving their skillset.

Two, due to the above reason, Fox developers had(have) some problems fitting into a corporate culture. I've seen several instances of this. Both going on a job interview at a shop where they were going to bring an outsourced project inhouse. Because the IT dept was totally unsatisfied with the performance of the firm the work was outsourced to. And I worked at a small company that started having big problems with their biggest client when the IT dept at the client started asking them to follow their standard corporate practices for software development.


>>>>>Should 'we' send a clear message?I
>>>
>>>I don't think the problem is the lack of a clear message <s>
>>>
>>>And I think MS's response is as clear as it can get.
>>
>>I take it that you mean no response is a very clear response.
>>
>>It would be a crying shame if that was how a (once) wonderful relationship was to end.
>>I can't see the folks responsible for VFP letting it end that way. If nothing else, how would it look to the other MS "communities"?
>>
>>My hope is that the issues with SP2 were unanticipated and MS is scrambling as I write to get people in place to address the problems. I only hope there's better testing next time.
>>
>
>Well, yes I would certainly hope that MS did not anticipate sp2 being more of a problem than a solution <s>
>
>I don't think testing has ever been the strong suit of the Fox team - no doubt because of being understaffed. Hence the view designer, which has never been a serious tool though it's functionality is core to writing n-tier VFP applications and there has never been an to make the test harness viable. One has to ask, if Steve Sawyer/Rick Schummer could write ViewEdit why couldn't the Fox team create a view designer?
>
>( I don't want to get off on a rant here <s> but personally, I think if around VFP 6.0 MS had just thrown some money at Schummer, Feltmans, Cristof, Hennig, Basoz, Roche, Martin Haluza, Pountney, Goodwin, and a couple other people they could have outsourced/bought a lot of stuff that would have made VFP 7 a really killer product. DBCX2, XFRX, a serious n-tier framework (VFE), good developer tools, SDT functionality for DBC/DBFs and a test harness should have been part of the product. VFP developers are notoriously pennywise and pound foolish about paying for 3rd party stuff so anything not included in the base product can easily be left out of developers' environments - so when we say "VFP development" and "VFP applications" we are talking about a very very broad spectrum of stuff and impressions about productivity and expected results in VFP development vary accordingly. But of course now that ship has sailed. The good news is, with the right 3rd party tools VFP still rocks and
>doesn't need an SP2 to do it. )
>
>I don't think the current resources MS is willing to throw into fixing the VFP SP are greater than they were in vfp 3,5,6,7,8 or 9 so while I would like to believe that there is "scrambling" going on to address this problem I am not making plans around it.
>
>VFP is what it is. I find it very usable at 9sp1 tricked out with 3rd party tools and using SQL Server as a backend. I like it and I use it and I will continue to use it wherever appropriate, but I don't have a lot of hope for any future enhancements or fixes coming from MS.