Denis,

>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.

There are two sides to this.

First, I think you have a much better chance of getting some feature you want by being very specific in your request and making a case for it in detail. Tell how you envision the feature working. Tell what that would do for you and other developers. Tell why alternatives or workarounds are not a sufficient solution. Make the case solidly for why MS should devote design, development and testing resources and what the payoff is for their customers.

Second, I agree that sometimes brainstorming from the MS Team has resulted in some interesting new features, such as CursorAdapter and XMLAdapter. I don't know if anyone asked them for those specific features, but perhaps several people made a compelling case to them for a way to standardize data access or provide hierarchical XML capabilities.

Either way, a case has to be made internally in the VFP Team at MS before anything new happens -- no matter if that case comes from the outside or from the inside. Just throwing out some general areas for improvement without "selling" the idea with the payoffs is most likely an exercise in futility.

Show them a real problem that needs a solution. Talk about some possible approaches to the problem. Prove to them that lots of VFP developers would benefit greatly from the solution. Prove how the lack of this feature is costing you business. Show how the improvement will benefit MS strategic initiatives, if applicable (example: XMLAdapter improves interaction with .NET Datasets and SQL Server XML).

Just as in any form of sales, make it very easy for MS to see the problem, some possible solutions, and the payoff (both for customers and for them) -- making it easy for them to say YES.

That's the way I would approach it if I had a request to make for improvements in a certain area of the product.