>George;
>
>A topic of conversation for the last several years amongst developers at the Silicon Valley Visual FoxPro User Group is the bastard child of Microsoft - Visual FoxPro. It seems VFP has some features from Visual C++ and Visual Basic, that the other two languages do not share with each other. Those additional features may not be a full implementation of the original language. In some cases it leaves the developer with the sense that they could almost do something useful with such features. Many of us keep saying: “Perhaps in the next version of VFP this will work properly”! In the mean time we continue to use bandages and jump through hoops. Just like the good old dBaseII days.
>
>Found a great pizza place (could be a chain?) called Pizz’A Chicago. One in Sunnyvale (near me) and the other in Palo Alto. It is as good or better than Uno’s. If you get out to the San Francisco Bay Area I will bring you there.
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Tom,

I usually don't get into this sort of dialog for various reasons, however...

I've never been one who has seen VFP as the "bastard" or "red-headed" step child of MS or even VS. It's a specialized product and as such will never get the attention, much less market share, that other products do. If I were to compare it to VB, I'd say VB's a Swiss Army Knife, and VFP's a fish scaler. A swiss army knife is great for a lot of general purpose things (like VB), but when it comes to scaling fish, you're better off using a tool that's designed for that. In this case, it would be doing large amount of data manipulation.

Secondly, it's not like MS isn't listening. Not only do they get regular updates updates from here, but Robert Green, Randy Brown, and others all frequent the UT from time to time. They're far more aware of the positives and negatives of implementing solutions to some of these problems. If I were to guess, every potential modification or solution is probably ananlyzed, evaluated and documented as to the total impact on the product. After this, they must decide what's in the best interest of the product, and often these decisions are probably based on information about the internals that are not readily available to us.