>Thanks. I'm not interested in spending $2700 to become a universal member just to get a jump on the compact framework. So I hope they don't wait to long on the release.

There are several levels of MSDN Subscriptions, not just Universal. There is Enterprise and Professional, which both include Visual Studio 97, VFP 7.0, Visual Studio .NET, and will soon include VFP 8.0 and VS .NET 2003. If you have VFP, you can obtain MSDN Pro DVD version for around $800 and get the same benefits like beta access and downloads to new versions just after they are released.