Here is the e-mail I got from Miles Thompson, our UT member, after we
visited one of the MS presentations in Halifax. Miles kindly allowed me to post it here.

**************************


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Miles Thompson [SMTP:mthompso@fox.nstn.ca]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 1997 11:42 AM
> To: Robert Green
> Subject: Whither Visual FoxPro
>
> Dear Mr. Green,
>
> Doug Hennig (Stonefield Systems Group) recommended I relate the
> following incident to you.
>
> Last Wednesday, Sept 24 at the Westin Nova Scotian Hotel we had a 1/2
> day Microsoft presentation featuring the DirectAccess program and "the

> Web". Visual FoxPro did not show up in the slides. (Acces, VB and SQL
> Server did). Nevertheless it was mentioned in the handout materials,
> and
> quite favourably, but it received no reinforcement during the
> presentation.
>
> At the break I asked the presenter, Kevin Ireland, to name Microsoft's

> visual languages. He replied " Visual Basic, Visual J++, Visual C++
> ...
> I think there was a Visual Cobol but it got dropped, and Visual Basic.

> Oh yeah, I mentioned that."
>
> I noted he had not mentioned Visual FoxPro, and he replied "We've
> been
> told not to mention it, I understand that it will be dropped". I left

> my card, asking him to e-mail what he knows, but I'm not expecting
> much.
>
> This threw me into a quandary, because I was hearing this from a
> Microsoft employee,yet from people who had attended DevCon the word
> was
> that VFP 6.0 was on the way.
>
> I'm about to launch a biggish project, not SQL Server size, but
> certainly bigger that one would want to do with Visual Basic and the
> Jet
> engine, and one which is certain to grow beyond its original scope.
> One
> is left wondering if it is time to change develpment environments. I
> would not want to, as I have been using FoxPro since version 1.02. A
> couple of years ago I did one project with VB 3.0(Accesss/Jet Engine
> 1.1)just to see what it was like; the less said the better. To switch
> now would mean missing all of the truly great object oriented features

> of VFP as well as its simplicity, power and speed.
>
> Yours truly,
> Miles Thompson
> CQA Consulting Group, Enfield, Nova Scotia
> Phone: 902-883-1010 Fax: 902-883-8586
> E-mail: mthompso@fox.nstn.ca

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Green [SMTP:rgreen@microsoft.com]
Sent: Monday, October 06, 1997 12:45 PM
To: 'Miles Thompson'
Subject: RE: Whither Visual FoxPro

Miles,

I'm sorry that you are getting confused messages. Obviously, Mr. Ireland

is not up to date on Visual FoxPro. We will have to educate him. <g> We
showed a preview of the next version at DevCon. It will ship at the same

time as the next version of Visual Studio. It will have support for
Microsoft Transaction Server and also for Active Documents, as well as
OLE Drag and Drop, and a host of other cool things.

Visual FoxPro is a very important part of the Visual Studio strategy of
building component based applications. VFP makes great data intensive
COM Components (aka Automation servers) and has a very fast and powerful

data engine. These can be used in conjunction with any front end (from
the browser to VFP) and with any back end via ODBC or OLE DB.

We will be posting more info on our Web site this week. So take a look
at that and rest assured that VFP has a home in Visual Studio and fully
supports the VS vision.

Robert Green
Visual FoxPro Product Manager
Microsoft Corp.
http://www.microsoft.com/vfoxpro