Hey Sergey,

Funny enough, I wrote that help file entry you quoted. When we changed what the value meant the help text had to be rewritten and I was in the middle of trying to clean up the help files so I took it on.

For Al: Mind you, I have been out of the loop for 3 years but the build process *was* automated. The devs would check in code by a certain time every day and the build process would kick off automatically. If we had a build that was a candidate for a milestone, such as an SP or Beta or whatever, we would freeze on that build and test it for some time even though the build system was still spitting out builds every day. In my recollection we rarely had more than one build on a given day - only if there was a critical failure in VFP that prevented us from doing anything or the build process itself failed.

I don't know how they are doing it now but if I were to guess I would say that they only do builds when the situation dictates instead of daily since it's not an active product cycle.


>Al,
>
>A build number is "encoded" date of the build not some build counter. From VFP9 help for VERSION() function:
>"For Visual FoxPro 9.0, the formula for calculating the product date, DDDD, is number of months since January 1, 2003 concatenated with the day of the current month. For example, 2215 corresponds to October 15, 2004".
>Below is your cursor with decoded build
>

>* Uses CAST(), requires VFP9 ;)
>CREATE CURSOR VFP9Blds ( BldName C( 10 ), BldNum I, BldDate D, BuildDecoded D )
>
>INSERT INTO VFP9Blds ( BldName, BldNum, BldDate ) ;
>	VALUES ( "SP0 (RTM)", 2412, {^2004-12-13} )
>
>INSERT INTO VFP9Blds ( BldName, BldNum, BldDate ) ;
>	VALUES ( "KB897575", 2826, {^2005-04-26} )
>
>INSERT INTO VFP9Blds ( BldName, BldNum, BldDate ) ;
>	VALUES ( "SP1", 3504, {^2005-11-04} )
>
>INSERT INTO VFP9Blds ( BldName, BldNum, BldDate ) ;
>	VALUES ( "SP2 v1", 5721, {^2007-09-21} )
>
>INSERT INTO VFP9Blds ( BldName, BldNum, BldDate ) ;
>	VALUES ( "SP2 v2", 5815, {^2007-10-15} )
>
>INSERT INTO VFP9Blds ( BldName, BldNum, BldDate ) ;
>	VALUES ( "KB948528", 6303, {^2008-05-14} )
>
>INSERT INTO VFP9Blds ( BldName, BldNum, BldDate ) ;
>	VALUES ( "KB952548", 6602, {^2008-06-03} )
>
>UPDATE VFP9Blds SET BuildDecoded = GOMONTH(ldBaseDate, (INT(BldNum/100))-1) + (BldNum%100) - 1
>
>BROWSE LAST NOWAIT
>

>
>
>>As far as I know, Microsoft has released 7 different builds of VFP9 (3 of them hotfixes). VFP9 SP0 ("RTM") was dated 2004.12.13, build number 2412. The latest build I know of is the KB952548 hotfix, 2008.06.03, build number 6602.
>>
>>I wrote a program with build information that generates some statistics (see below). Over the full time span, the build rate is a little over 3 per day. Most of the build rates between builds are close to this as well, a figure this steady implies an automated process rebuilding/recompiling the source several times per day whether any code changes have been made or not.
>>
>>The significant exceptions are:
>>
>>- between SP2 v2 and KB 948528, where the build rate dropped to 2.30/day (implies relative inactivity)
>>- between KB948528 and KB952548, where it spiked to 14.95/day (implies that KB952548 was a hard bug to fix)
>>
>>Anyone know of any other interim or later builds, with build numbers and file dates?
>>
>>It would be nice to have the hotfixes available somewhere, like on ProLib rather than having to go through the hassle of MS Support to get them.
><snip>