Once upon a time, if I'm not mistaken, there used to be a monthly update via a news letter from the VFP Program Manager posted on the VFP homepage. I see that the most recent one was done back on April 2009 by the current(?) Program Manager, Milind Lele.
Now I know VFP is at a dead end in the eyes of Microsoft so I shouldn't expect much in terms of "news" to be posted. The thing that really irks me is that while I can understand and live with their decision to pull the plug on VFP, why didn't Milind at least make a post there/somewhere to say farewell? I mean, part of the reason VFP was a success and continued to grow despite the attempts to give it a premature death, was the very close knit community. That community involved the personnel at Microsoft too. It seems to me that since Milind was brought onboard, he never really got involved. Perhaps I'm wrong, but, I've never seen him do the types of things that a guy like Ken Levy did (like keynote speeches, active blog entries about VFP, etc). I don't think Milind "ever got VFP" or wanted to and was simply the guy who drew the short straw when it came to finding a replacement for Ken.
I'll admit that I don't know anything about Milind as a person and he could be a really "good" guy. It's just that to me, he never seemed "into it" as the Product Manager. He seems to me to be there just to fill a space. I could just picture him at Microsoft trying to keep a very low profile regarding anything related to VFP. I can say the same about Ken Levy in that I don't know him as a person, but Ken surely knew how to behave :) Another noteworthy individual was Calvin Hsia. He used to blog constantly about VFP stuff. Over the years, I could see that Calvin was slowly moving into .NET, but, his transition was an observable, gradual swing. Even when Calvin was full blown .NET, he'd blog about converting a VFP app/snippet into .NET. My observation is that Milind seems to be the complete opposite.
Now if you're saying Milind is just a quiet kinda guy and that's the way he is, how do you explain his very active role as Program Manager of the Visual Basic Team at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/tags/Milind%20Lele/default.aspx and
http://blogs.msdn.com/vsdata/archive/2008/10/28/visual-studio-2010-ctp-available-by-milind-lele.aspxKeep Googling and he's all over VB.NET. I can see he's "into VB.NET". I can see he wasn't a VFPer and in my mind, Ken was the Microsoft face for VFP and always be.
Just my 2cents FWIW.
