Ken,
SNIP

Since this is a "pet project" of mine I can't resist commenting. . .

It is clear that the VFP Team has/is working closely with UT as regards the Toledo Wish List, and that's a very good thing.

That the VFP Team already has a solid plan in place for Toledo development is not at all surprising, given that VFP7 has been released for about 4 months now and Toledo is the next release.

But I would like to learn how it is that the VFP Team does not need feedback "to help determine which ERs are most significant to VFP developers". Assuming, for instance, that the same mechanism is in place today that was in place for the VFP6 and VFP7 ER evaluations/determinations, then something went very wrong with the process, especially as relates to VFP6. In my opinion VFP7 did deliver significant new and improved stuff, but several others here did comment that it seemed light on good new stuff.

That comments can be added to any Toledo Wish List item is surely a good thing, but it does suffer from a couple of deficiencies as I see it.
1) The list itself is almost hidden, being well out of the way and two levels down;
2) The comment feature is a little difficult to work with and its presentation takes a lot of space, likely making many comments difficult to absorb.

Being out of the way is likely a necessity for such a large list, but the question it raises is why need it only be out of the way???
Being out of the way instantly limits who will access it. Sure, all can access it, but I bet that many don't. You've gotta select a list box item called "Visual FoxPro Zone", then select "Toldeo Wish List", and then you finally have the last 50 wish items viewable. My guess is that the majority don't go there.

I think there is something that could be done to significantly improve the accessibility and visibility of each individual wish. . .
Since each wish now has a "Area" and "Sub-area" column pair it would not be difficult to map these to existing VFP forum categories. Then the UT could replicate the wish ,automatically generating a new thread within the (mapped) category. This would guarantee full exposure of the wish.
Then each reply to that thread could similarly be replicated into the wish comments area, stripping out the quoted lines to make it exactly as it is today.

Having this full exposure would do much to improve the content of the wish list:
1) Redundancies would likely be (almost) eliminated;
2) Some wishes might well be eliminated, either because respondents might show that there already is a similar feature or that the desired result is achievable with a small combination of commands/actions;
3) Most wishes would be improved by virtue of wide discussion contributing additional thoughts or questioning things that would serve to clarify the wish.

It also might then not be a huge step to incorporate a special header or footer into the generated thread, carried forward with each reply, to allow the respondent to "vote" his/her relative importance rating (from a fixed list of 4 or 5 choices) for that wish.
And since the name of each contributor of any message is known it would be a simple matter to keep a record of only their last "vote" on any wish.

There is also the question of the content of the wish list that the VFP Team itself is working with. Since the UT is not the sole source for wishes, it would be most helpful to us to have the "official" list available to us somewhere, along with a 'status' indication. I have already mentioned this here to Randy Brown and have not given up hope that something may materialize for this in the future.

Thanks for listening.

Jim


>
>The Fox team at Microsoft is working closely with the UT to set up the WishList so that it helps the Fox team getfeedback for future versions of VFP. We already have XML access to the WishList data which we import into a VFP DBF for review. This voting feature is not needed for us to help determine which ERs are most significant to VFP developers, and people can freely add comments to the WishList ERs that have already been posted. You should also know that Microsoft has already started development Toledo (code name for the next version of VFP) and that while we encourage people to submit enhacement ideas and suggestions, the Fox team already has a solid design plan for Toledo right now.