>> We do not accept any advertisement in the content created by members.
>> If you wish to advertise, you may use the appropriate areas or tools
>> available on the site.

>> I have no problem with what their company is about, with anyone moving
>> to .Net, etc. It has nothing to do with their web site content, broken
>> links, etc. I have a big problem with blatant advertising and the manner
>> in which they went about it.

I guess UT "officials" must have not agreed with you. After all, the messages are still there, and nobody has contacted us. Although the UT is clearly aware of these messages. For one it is hard to miss, and for the other, the current top headline on the UT homepage says: "EPS Announces an Exciting New Developer Portal".

I realize that some people saw this as "blatant advertising". Certainly, the message was posted to make people aware of the page, so I guess it by definition is advertisement. However, it would have not occured to me that forum rules could be broken. After all, we had announced things here in the past, such as web sites and papers, and even commercial offerings, such as training. And clearly, other people are doing that as well.

However, if we did offend people (and at this point, it would appear that that's the case <s>) then I am sorry, and it certainly wasn't the intention to offend people (after all, it would negate the purpose of such an announcement). It was clear to us that some people would make snide remarks (and therefore flame us), but we certainly didn't expect this.

I guess the "blatant" part comes into the picture, because the announcement was time-wise so close to the VFP9 beta announcement. I can assure you that that was coincidence. We have a partnership with the DevEssential conference and had arranged to have a press release regarding VFPConversion.com in the attendee bags. When we set that up, there was no way for us to know that the VFP team was going to make an announcement that weekend.

That aside, it does surprise me that people think VFPConversion.com in some way contributes to VFP's death. In fact, I am very surprised that we once again need to start about VFP dying. VFP will be around for a long time to come, and there are lots of uses where we find it useful. There are other uses, where I find .NET more useful. And yet other uses where the combination of the two is great. I think it is well known that we use a lot of VFP here at EPS, and we plan to do so for a long time to come. But when it comes to other things, VFP is not a tool that is ideal or can be used at all. I am sure this is not news to you.

Personally, it is my believe that making information about VFP and .NET (in combination) available to the community will extend VFP's lifetime. Having the ability to publish VFP web service through ASP.NET for instance, is crucially important for VFP to parttake in modern scenarios. Many developers may think that web services are not important to them, but in the big picture, web services are extremely important, and ASP.NET is what extends VFP into those scenarios. The same is true for many other scenarios. You may have seen posts of mine that look a little further into the future, and discuss things such as Longhorn.

Also, people got so worked up over part of the site focusing on .NET, that they completely ignored the statement at the very top of the page that states that we will also cover conversion to SQL Server back ends. Content needs to be added, true, but the site is only a few days old, so just give us a little time.

Content btw will be driven by user demand. A lot of stuff that is currently on the site (and will be added over the next weeks) is based on the inquiries we have been getting over the last 6 to 12 months. Future topics will also be demand driven. Currently, I would say that it is likely that we will add topics that will educate .NET developers about how to integrate VFP in their efforts.

I also think that it is pretty likely that we will add content about how to convert between different versions of VFP. As a company, we have already commited to creating VFP9 content. So far, this has to do with the magazine, but I think we might do some stuff for that portal as well. We have recently also been getting a surprising amount of inquiries about *really old* FoxPro apps. 2.x and older. As you can imagine, some of those now really need to be converted, but most of the old conversion papers do not talk about upgrading to today's world. So perhaps we will revisit that topic as well. Maybe we will present some ways that will show FP/DOS developers what options they have if they want to move from FP/DOS straight to Visual FoxPro using SQL Server and adding a web service interface. Wouldn't that be an interesting paper? I'd think so.

Perhaps it is the name of the site that caused the mass panic on this thread. Perhaps "VFPConversion.com" can be seen too negatively. "ExtendYourVFPSkillsInAllKindsOfWays.com" would describe the situation better, but marketing vetoed this one <s>.

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