Lynda,

Isn't the problem here the fact that you or the client took the "expected" availability as if it were a hard and fast, signed, sealed, and delivered, sworn in court, availiblity date, instead of an "expected" date or the "general rule" that Craig described of about six weeks? I'm suggesting that the "loss of credibility" was because the client chose to make promises which depended too much on the actions of others - not a wise decision. They could have planned that VFP would be available on 08/01 but padded their expected release date of their own software by a month or so.

The links are probably broken because Microsoft has completely reorganized it's website in the last two months and the outsiders haven't gotten all their links updated.

Also, my guess is that many independent developers consider MSDN Universal "essential" rather than "out of reach."

The reason that retail vendors don't list VFP in stock is that they are probably not bargaining on the "expected" availablility, but rather are waiting for "actual" availability to note the change on their web pages.

Even so, I hear your frustrations.


>Many of us who have not been involved in the VFP beta have been seeing demos and hearing feature descriptions of VFP 7.0 for at least a year now. In fact, beta copies were distributed at a user group meeting several months ago. Believing the hype as well as the rumors of imminent release, I convinced a client that VFP 7 was worth waiting for. We built and tested an awesome tool for his web site. He promoted the new functionality "coming soon" to his clients. Weeks after RTM we're still waiting. It appears that the only way to get VFP 7 is MSDN Universal, a source out of reach of most independent developers -- once the largest group of VFP users and, it appears, still the most loyal. You can't buy VFP 7 from Microsoft at any price. All links to retail vendors from the Microsoft site are mysteriously broken. Online searches reveal no sources for the upgrade product. The 3 sites listing VFP 7 in their inventory do not have product in stock. Does anyone have an idea when or where
>the upgrade might be available? While the loss of time and money caused by this additional delay isn't trivial, it's the loss of credibility within an existing client base that concerns me.