So,

1. By making the Beta public by giving it away to all DevCon attendees, you aren't making it generally available. I guess my question would be, why not? Many other MS products have had publically available betas. They have either had a time out, or with VFP, you could not distribute runtimes with the 8.0 beta. Also, this ties with issue 2.

2. Just because a Beta is made public/released/given to the 1000 attendees of a conference, doesn't put them all in the beta program. So, you still have a manageable size of beta sites that actually can report beta issues, however this is done. Although, I would assume that people that are 'official' beta testers saw something on a forum that was reported by a non beta tester, but a beta 'getter' (devcon attendee).

3. Look at the tremendous number of .Net stuff that came out before the release. You even had books written based on Beta 2 of it. If VFP had a public beta, and it is as good as we have been lead to believe (feature wise, not stability wise, VFP betas are generally pretty stable) then it would only increase the coverage, articles, press and marketing that VFP 8.0 woud recieve. Heck, you could get several press releases out with a public beta.

4. Don't MSDN subscribers get beta versions that were released to anyone outside of the beta sites?

Anyway, just my thouhts comments and questions on the subject. I can't wait to see the beta!

BOb