Hi Hank:

That's good to hear and what everyone wants to hear. The general consensus of the meeting was the major problem was lack of responsiveness which caused Jay to use too many hours installing that he would have otherwise used in familiarization. I believe everyone is looking forward to what the the results of working with it the upcoming month. I am expecting more positive results even though the software will probably still be buggy.

Scott

>HI Scott,
>
>just to report a different experience with the .Net Compiler. Which wasn't my interest when I bought it, but it turned out that if I wanted to automate messaging from GTalk (which I wanted to do for our build process, to notify the team when new builds were ready for testing), the easiest way was an open source .Net library. I ran into a couple of issues, emailed info@etecnologia.net, got prompt answers, and we're still using it, nearly a year later. I am not saying that your speaker's issue with lack of response was unusual, just that my experience over the time I have been using it and the Compiler for .Net is that usually, but not always, the reply is prompt.
>
>Hank
>
>>I attended the Los Angeles VFP Users group meeting last night where Jay Hudson gave a presentation, sharing his recent experience with eTechnologia's .NET Compiler for VFP.
>>
>>A quick summary is: Difficult to install, very buggy, vendor is unresponsive, not beta quality software, and little used by anyone.
>>
>>Jay tried installing on two or three machines (including a relatively clean install of Windows 7) before a successfully installing on Windows XP (SP2 I believe) laptop. Typically the software would fail looking for a DLL that was present.
>>
>>eTechnologia was unresponsive in assisting with the problems and there was no phone number to call. The documentation was sparse and of little or no use.
>>
>>The "Compiler for .NET Wiki" site shows very little activity. The Google Users Group has recent activity but no indication that more than a very small group of individuals are involved and those that are aren't having much, if any, success.
>>
>>While getting the "Hello World" project working and making minor modifications the frustration was obvious. Lines marked for compile error for no obvious reason, unfathomable compiler error messages, and mystifying runtime failures were par for the course.
>>
>>At the end of the two to three hours it was painfully obvious the compiler has a long long way to go. On the other hand, "Deugging by Committee" was more enjoyable than knocking your head against the wall all by yourself. One of the attendees volunteered to work with the compiler between now and the meeting next month.
>>
>>The pizza was good.