>I guess so. INETA was announced back in February of this year. FWIW, I don't think this is a bad thing. I think it is good to see MS giving full support to the .NET development community. It would be nice if they included all of their products in that plan, but MS has always advanced their agenda by being good to developers. That agenda happens to include .NET right now, and not VB or VFP. Unfortunately, that is making it harder for other user groups to compete.
"Compete" is exactly the proper term to use it. This is going way out of proportion of what a community is suppose to be. For years, we have worked with other user groups in Montreal for the benefit of developers and now all those user groups have to compete against the local .NET user group being set up and managed, in a large proportion by MS, as well as getting sponsorship from it which is the same company which is the owner of VFP and VB, right? It's just shocking to know that, at least in Montreal, and JR will be able to tell me otherwise if I'm wrong, I don't remember having heard MS that it was sponsoring a speaker for the VFP user group. So, that practice is new but also shocking as we never benefited of such a priviledge for making MS products known to the developers community including good trainings.
>As a VFP developer, I enjoy one of the best online communities, that was built by the community, not MS. I certainly wouldn't trade you folks in for door prizes. Of course, I would like to see some of the big name gurus in our community speak in person, but any one of them would speak to me one-on-one on a forum or through email. I guess I've got no complaints, but again, the credit doesn't go to MS.
It has been known for years that the best communities are built by individuals. I believe that's the best way to built them. But, time changes. Now, MS wants to control a new set of communities by applying their leadership and control which makes it practically impossible for any other developers to come up with initiative such as continuing/creating user groups, holding events, etc.
