With that "train of thought" in mind why does Microsoft provide any ODBC drivers or OLE DB providers for free? In this situation I as a developer have purchased a MSDN subscription and need to access VFP data from ASP. I am a little puzzled by this posturing. I know most knowledgeable clients who purchase applications consider data connectivity during the discovery process. Now I must respond to clients that if they want to access VFP data from Excel they have to either have me install a provider, use a legacy ODBC driver or purchase VFP.

I’m a little curious what the developer community thinks about this.


>The VFP 7.0 OLE DB provider is only available when you purchase or upgrade to VFP 7.0 and install and use it as a runtime (like the VFP 7.0 runtime DLLs). Microsoft has no interest in giving the VFP OLE DB provider away for free, to say a Delphi developer who needs to connect to VFP data. If anyone needs to use the VFP 7.0 OLE DB provider, get VFP 7.0. If you have any other questions, let me know.