David and David,
I'm at a loss!... I am talking about bug reporting GENERALLY and NOT VFP9 public beta bug reporting!... I am talking about FabioL's declaration, as I understood it, that he would not be feeding his reports on bugs to the MS facility (likely based on never getting feedback EVER in the past and none mentioned in the public beta cycle either)!!! I'm talking about the DIFFERENCE between getting feedback and never getting feedback unless you're "connected"!!!
I realize that I could have applied to be a VFPx beta tester and that in those instances I might get some feedback on issues I submit but I stopped beta testing for any software vendor some time ago and I have also been far too busy the last 6-8 months to have considered it anyway.
Some time back a VFP Team member mentioned here that the VFP Team was looking into some form of feedback mechanism for regular bugs reported the regular way. When something is announced in that regard I will change my tune. Until then I don't blame anybody, and I personnaly refuse, to feed black holes.
TamarG's main message seemed to be that there are people who do far more than FabioL as regards bug detection and reporting. I say good for them... and how does that relate to WalterM's comment that FabioL seems to have reported far more bugs here than anyone else??? Has it occurred to these contributors of massive amounts of bug reports that it would be incontestably HELPFUL TO THE COMMUNITY to copy/paste their volumes of bug reports here too???
I wonder why it is that very few of the "in crowd" see fit to comment positively on the things that FabioL does here?
The "in crowd" has obviously had special channels available to them and like to hide under "NDA" to keep those channels mysterious. The whole point of my reply to TamarG was that those of us who do not enjoy the benefit of these channels live in a different world. The "in crowd" gets feedback and they are happy campers. The REST OF US never hear anything... so we try various things to help ourselves... and the "in crowd" only sees fit to sh*t on those meagre attempts!
One final note. Every now and then us unconnecteds get a "win". I consider the years of agitation by many people here and elsewhere finally resulted in a public WISH LIST. I don't think anyone can argue that the Wish List has been a huge contributor to getting much much much much more MEANINGFUL releases out of the VFP Team. Yet, strangely, several of the "in crowd" saw fit, and some still continue, to argue against having the 'official' Wish List here on UT. The reasonings they offered were stupid and obviously were hiding the real sentiments.
Anyway, here's the thing... maybe the rest of us are ALSO right as regards providing a public list of known bugs and statuses of those bug. Maybe. Yet the "in crowd" consistently poo-poo's the idea. Maybe that's real easy to do when one can check those things for themselves. But I still have trouble as to why anyone would want to deprive us Joe Averages of the same?!?!
SET VENT OFF
Jim
...>Jim,
>
>>And many of us are disinclined to use the official Joe Average route because feeding black holes is a useless exercise...
>
>In addition to my previous post, giving the official request for bug reporting (from the release docs), here is a very interesting plea from VFP9 Test Manager John Koziol for people to post bug reports to the official link, with his assurance that everything posted there "will, I repeat
will be passed on to the product team..."
>
>Again, the statements from Microsoft people indicate that this is not a "black hole" or "useless exercise." You may continue to believe otherwise if you wish, but there is no logic in that point of view.
>
>This was posted June 10 on the VS Data team blog:
>
>
http://blogs.msdn.com/vsdata/archive/2004/06/10/153250.aspx>
>
Help Us Create a Better Visual FoxPro 9.0 (by John Koziol)>(Pre-note: I really must do something with my passive voice style of posts...and my predilection to the participial phrase....I'm working on it <g>)
>
>The public beta of VFP 9.0 has been released (whoo hoo!) and we're seeing a lot of issues posted in newsgroups, blogs, and other online forums. This is great! Love to see VFP community enthusiasm! Just one problem....there are lotsa y'all and not lots of us. I don't have stats to verify this, but I would guess that, after awhile, the ratio of beta downloaders to MS folks directly involved with VFP 9 will easily top 500:1.
>
>Yeah, so? Well, the implication is that there are a lot of you with really good things to say and really good issues that should be addressed before the product is released but we may not see them. We have a product to ship; none of us can sit back and monitor every conceivable forum for issues. Also, it's impossible for us to model all potential real-world applications very well. We are frequently and pleasently surprised at where and how VFP is used.
>
>We have a link set up for customer bug reporting. It's here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=/support/vfoxpro/report/report.asp&sd=msdn>
>Anything posted there will, I repeat
will, be passed on to the product team. Furthermore, you can post comments there that aren't bugs at all if you want to be heard on an issue or two.
>
>VFP 8 and, now, VFP 9 are built on customer feedback and external enhancement requests to a large degree. So it's more important than ever that we get your feedback on our beta. So what gives us feedback? Try this: Recompile every VFP app you have ever written and put it through it's paces under the VFP 9 beta. See something you can't explain?
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=/support/vfoxpro/report/report.asp&sd=msdn See something which you can explain but you don't like?
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=/support/vfoxpro/report/report.asp&sd=msdn>
>My final point is that nothing we do is worth anything if we're not helping you. Help us help you.
>
>posted on Thursday, June 10, 2004 9:58 PM
