>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.
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>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.

>>he can do what he considers enough with Fox out of the box.

That is the idea I find most disturbing. To me, it smacks of amateur and a failure to understand our role in the business environment and why people pay us.

I work on a lot of project rescue stuff and rewrites of VFP apps some developer considered "enough" and it becomes obvious quickly that the curse of dbase legacy stuff has always been that it allows pretty much anybody to get something up that sort of almost works - up to a point.

And that is reputation we have to live with. It worked in the 80s when the mainframe database people wouldn't talk to us anyway and on the desktop the one-eyed man was king, but expectations about professional apps have changed.

I can forgive not wrestling with activex controls as aside from DBI they never were really written to play well with Fox. But I really get tired of listening to VFP 'developers' with limited skill sets talk about 'rolling my own' regarding a framework when they don't even understand the issues involved, let alone how to solve them. I blame this partially on MS in presenting VFP 3.0. They introduced OO and base classes and then said 'and now the first thing you have to do in order to use this tool correctly is to develop a framework' I've worked closely enough with what I regard to be the two most gifted framework developers in the business to know just what that entails, even for those who understand the issues and have the knowledge to pull it off and the client base to allow doing it full time. I'm not saying that there are not other developers capable of writing their own frameworks ( and I could probably name most of them <s> ) but just because you can build your own house doesn't mean it is the best use of your time if your goal is to have a warm, safe and stylish place to live while you make a living.

And since rolling out a new language/paradigm means not scaring people, MS shows sample apps and beginner materials about how to do things the easy way - even though you already know that is not best practice and you are teaching habits a real professional will have to outgrow - so we get Tastrade and a lot of stuff about dragging tables into DEs and binding directly to tables etc ( and we see a lot of the same kinds of thing in .NET )

As I said before, snowplowing maybe less scary than learning to carve turns, but it's ugly, it's slow, and it ain't skiing.

The framework developers moved past all this very quickly - at the cost of a lot of time and effort and after throwing a lot of mental horsepower at the issue. But people who didn't even know what the problem was balked at spending $500 and blathered on about 'I like to know what's under the hood' in explaining why they thought themselves capable of writing a framework. ( and my guess is they still don't have one and don't even know it )

I'm not a framework builder and I do know it and I know the money I spent on buying and mastering a professionally developed framework was the key to recouping my investment multiple thousandfold by solving business problems for clients.

And I work for myself, always have, and pay for everything out of my own pocket.

If I had to write VFP apps against DBF tables without a professional framework, third party tools like SDT to handle DBF/DBC sync , XFRX, ViewEdit, VFEGenview, a robust data dictionary (DBCX2) ... I'd have started doing something else for a living back in the 90s.

I am always stunned when people who are in technological or scientific fields do not understand the principle of leveraging and building on the knowledge and work of others.

Regarding your second point, I don't think we (ie vfp ) can completely overcome the standard practices issue - though writing against sql backends takes care of a lot of it.

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>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.
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>>>>>>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.
>>>
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>>Well, yes I would certainly hope that MS did not anticipate sp2 being more of a problem than a solution <s>
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>>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?
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>>( 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. )
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>>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.
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>>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.