Hey Alex. Just to clarify on some of the way the VFP team was structured in the last decade. First, Robert wasn't tasked to kill VFP. During the VFP 6.0 years, Microsoft was in the process, as a company, to deemphasis VFP as strategic and to focus on VB and then .NET instead. In 2000-2001, Robert was working on VFP as well as VB and .NET. It's difficult to market multiple products when hey complete, and when one is not strategic. Robert represented the Microsoft strategy, so it's Microsoft to blame and not Robert.

When Microsoft released VFP 7.0, that's when it was decided to have product manager for VFP outside of the VB/.NET marketing team who worked directly on the Fox team and was more community focused - which is when I became VFP product manager in August 2001.

How the Fox team was structured, at least relative to the people mentioned in this thread (me, Randy, Calvin, yag) was that I defined the positioning framework, which included what I thought should be the main feature focus for the next version (VFP 8 and then VFP 9). Randy, as program manager, wrote the specifications for the actual features in VFP to be added in the next version. For VFP 7.0 and 8.0, another program manager was Gene Goldhammer, who focused on data like CursorAdapter and buffering, etc. Calvin was one of several developers (the C++ code VFP is based on), and as lead developer he and the other developers basically implemented the specs that the program management team provided. Ricardo Wenger was the group manager for VFP 7.0 and part way through VFP 8.0. Then yag took over as group manager. yag didn't write any specifications for VFP, and he actually spent more of his time on non-VFP stuff like the data aspects in VS as he was the VS Data group manager (which included the VFP team). yag mainly reviewed what the Fox team members did, and was a layer of management between the Fox team and upper management. yag was never a full-time member of the Fox team, about 75% of his time and his team were part of VS data, the other 25% or so was for VFP related management overseeing the Fox team.

The thing that is most important to know is that we all worked as a team on VFP product features. No one person deserves created for features like you listed below. All of the Fox team members would review the specs, often various team members including the test team would help greatly enhance the details of the new features before implementation. The key VFP community members (gurus, alpha testers, etc under NDA) would also help us review the features before the development team implemented them. Then things would change and be enhanced in early alpha and beta testing. Some features came right from the community, from the UT wish list and direct feedback.

I've read many of the messages posted in this thread. I agree with those comments that side on the idea of not nominating anyone from the Fox team for the lifetime achievement award. The lifetime achievement award was something I thought up and initially gave to Whil Henzten in 2002 at the WhilFest event. I never thought of it as something any Fox team (Microsoft employee) would receive. So I would not want to be nominated for it. The people that have won the award over the years clearly stand out as deserving it, and the more people receive it the harder it gets to select someone else who stands out as much. We might be at a point where you can name 5 people who deserve it about equality with it being difficult to differentiate the lifetime contribution. At this point, it would probably be someone who as contributed for 20+ years (thus the 'lifetime' term), and would make sense to pick someone who is still very active in the VFP community. It's easy when you can select one clear winner and everyone agrees with no dispute. The main downside I see at this point is when someone new is awarded and some people have a different subjective point of view on who should have been awarded instead. I would want to be the one to select who to be awarded at this point, too many names come to mind that have contributed in many ways. But it's great to acknowledge those who have contributed greatly for a long time, and whoever is awarded in the future should be thanks and appreciated regardless of they were at the top of some people's list or not.

>I suppose I contrast him to Robert Green whose most famous comment was "if you haven't seen it in two versions, take the hint" He was supposed to be the marketing guy? Actually we all know his job was to kill VFP as quickly as possible, and I despise him for it.
>
>The biggest thing Ken did was to convince MS not to hold back on what could be included in VFP. MS had already crippled VFP by delaying its developement (which it wanted to do so VFP would not steal the show from MS's other products), but Ken convinced MS to include at the end the type of things that should have been including all along, and I appreciate that Ken did that. All the while he made very clear that VFP was not strategic for MS. He did not lie.
>
>These are just a few of the credits I give Ken:
>
>- He went through developers requests and made priority those that he thought were useful. That's marketing.
>- WITH (BUFFERING = .T.) This is HUGE
>- AutoInc field type Very useful
>- TRY / CATCH I am not saying he invented TRY / CATCH, just that he thought enough of VFP to bring it here.
>- BindEvent Can do powerful stuff
>- SCATTER NAME Huge too
>- He got MS to agree to change it's licensing terms of source code variations. It should have been done before, but he did it.
>- And many other enhancements that just made sense.
>
>That is why Ken has my appreciation and respect and I would give him my vote for lifetime contribution to VFP.
>
>Alex