Ken..

I love how you dance around the issue. Are you telling the public that adding Visual FoxPro to the following list:

Visual Basic, ASP, Visual C++, etc.

would have been that burdensome? What is odd is that VFP has a recently released version. The products stated above cannot make that claim. Are things that bad that VFP cannot get respect to either be listed with products undergoing retirement or with the new slate of products such as VS .NET???

FWIW, I don't consider the simple listing of a product to be classified as "marketing"..

The faint promise of having VFP included in a future edition of the magazine completely misses the point. For one thing, if a "relatively small percentage" of people are readers of MSDN, from a business standpoint, how can the page space be justified for VFP? If they (MSDN) won't even list VFP - which has zero incremental cost - why would they go ahead in the future and allocate page psace - which does have an incremental cost. Simply put, your statement below, on its face, is quite self-contradictory....

For too long, people have to constantly email you or somebody else about VFP getting omitted here or there. All the while, the story is "it will get better..." The fact is, you probably don't have a lot of control over what these other operating areas can do. In other words, they are most likely operating within the bound of their descretion. If this were not so, we would not see these omissions continuing today. As always, people are "free" to email you with these ommissions...< s > I see it as an EIF (Excercise in Futility)

The paradox is (no pun intended) is that people should expect to see VFP listed when it is relevant. In this case, it was relevant. I don't think people should expect to see VFP feature articles in the magazine for the reasons you list. Yet, you take the opposite tact here - or at the very least, hold out some faint hope that someday in the future, a VFP feature article in MSDN will come to pass.

When you take this statement as a whole - looking at it objectively, it really says nothing...< s >... Good marketing double-speak nevers says much - but still leaves the impression that it actually said something - even if you cannot immediately or directly identify what that something was. Your initial explanations of why the VFP OLE-DB Provider were not included in MDAC were similar examples of "weak" marketing speak....

Again the bottom line, VFP developers should expect to see their product included in a simple list of other VFP products when the relevant category is the subject of the list. To tell people otherwise is wrong.

The more you talk and explain yourself in public Ken, the more you undermine your efforts and to a large extent, your credibility. At some point, you will finally understand this and take a page from your predessor's notebook..< s >..


>I already saw this, and last week I exchange email with all the editors of MSDN Magazine. The fact is, a relatively small percentage of the readers of MSDN Mag are using VFP compated to other products, but VFP 7.0 was part of the cover story in the last October edition. We will probably have VFP included in a future edition of MSDN Magazine. You should not expect VFP to always be listed every time a series of Microsoft technologies are listed, it will generally depend on the audience. Also, my efforts of marketing VFP within Microsoft are ongoing. Feel free to email me anytime you see a source where VFP is not listed and you think it should be.