>First off Microsoft is not abandoning VFP.

Hmmm

>Second, even if they did they surely wouldn't make it open source because there's too much technology in the product that is used elsewhere in Microsoft.

That is enough justification for MS for not selling it.

>What would be the possible benefit of that anyway?

Impossible but if it would be possible:

Get a dead weight off their shoulders.
Get rid of the black sheep in their family of development environments.
<g>

>To Microsoft none - other than loosing some revenue along with potential future customers.

Now I'd have to use a word but it became forbidden to mention it over here. At least for me. If you don't know that word I'll just say that it begins with "Mark" and ends with "eting".

To get future customers you have to make efforts to get them. Do you really think it's the case with the (put forbidden word here) being done on VFP?

When was the last time you saw and add or anything else for that matter stating in which situations VFP would be a better tool than anything else? Oh yeah there's that place where they compare Access to VFP <g>


>Heck, you love VFP so much yet you've publicly stated that you probably won't upgrade to 9.0 because it doesn't offer anything you need. So where are your loyalties really?

Come on Rick you're a very bright guy don't make comments like that. Would you buy the newest version of anything if according to you the most important innovation on that new version was the new color used for the shipping box?

>Do you think there will be hordes of developers lining up to extend FoxPro? More importantly, will you? VFP is a based a lot on an ancient codebase for one thing and outside of the FoxPro community nobody will be very interested to work on a product like this. Remember Fox programmers probably don't have the skills to work on a C++ project to provide new functionality so this resource pool of developers would have to come mostly from outside of the Fox community.

Here I'll refer to your first point "First off Microsoft is not abandoning VFP."

If it was the case VFP would've been modified so that the ancient codebase would'nt be anciend codebase no more.

>All that said, Microsoft has given no indication they won't continue updating Visual FoxPro. What you don't get apparently is that the Fox team has for the last couple of years asked developers what they want out of the product for future versions and while there's been lots of input on fixing small things and updating this or that, there aren't really groundbreaking or enhancning ideas coming forth.

Why should enhancements only come from developers. I take myself as an example. We are developing an application for a vertical market. What do you think our application would look like if we only modified it based on the demands of the users. Sure their input is highly valued because they're the ones with the experience in that market. But besides that we're the ones with the experience on the IT world. So I'm sure that they don't really know about "web services", "XML" ... So they can't ask for things that they don't know about.

So it's the same for us developers. We don't know what MS is up to so we can't ask them to put it in VFP.

>What do you want? Why let others do the work for you - say what is that you want... and don't be vague like 'better Internet support'.

Danger here. If you say too much you won't probably get it all. If your specification has a high level of precision you probably will get that and only that. If you have a broader demand than it's the developers at MS that will have to do brainstorming to see what would be the best solution overall.


I respect your opinion when you state that MS is not abandoning VFP but I don't feel the same way about it. To me releases of new versions is not enough. you have to show after that release that you really care and the answer to me here is (put forbidden word here). Not the minimal for but a real effort to show developers that they're working with a tool that really has a future.