>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/vfoxproI have a big baseball bat that Mr. Green can use to educate Mr. Ireland.
Steve
