Mail Sended1
De MasFoxPro Wiki
(Sended to Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Eric Rudder, Soma Somasegar, Bill Hiff and Sanjay Parthasarathy. See who's who at Masfoxpromail)
Hi,
After the announcement that Microsoft did in http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vfoxpro/bb308952.aspx for not continuing future Visual FoxPro development, I want to express:
As customer I want to know a convincing explanation or logical reason as to why Microsoft decided not to release version 10 of Visual FoxPro.
Visual FoxPro is the best desktop database development environment to date. .NET still lacks many of the better features that Visual FoxPro has in it for years.
This announcement has been a major blow to the FoxPro community. This is especially true for the medium and small application developers (the vast majority of developers in Visual FoxPro), that have many years of Visual FoxPro code. It is not practical or cost effective to attempt to move these applications to Microsoft's recommended development environment (.NET). The community is rethinking its future development platform.
I ask you to continue future Visual FoxPro development, if this cannot fit with Microsoft needs, I suggest two other possibilities that would benefit the community (in order of relevance):
- Release the full Visual FoxPro source code to Open Source (even restricted in any way)
- Form a partnership with a third party so that this third party can continue Visual FoxPro development
I express again my full support for the great work the VFP Team has done for years and have no doubt that they can continue to improve an already excellent product.
Microsoft will benefit having more than one application development environment group. Having multiple points of view provides a much more efficient way to solve problems. And since the budget for maintaining the Foxteam is so small, that does not pose a huge financial burden for Microsoft.
By demand from the community, a web site called MasFoxPro (MoreFoxPro), has been put up, I think I own my MVP to the community and if they (and me) think we need MoreFoxPro, I’ll support them. The website is located at:
Looking forward to your reply,
Regards,
PD: PortalFox is the main Spanish speaking developers portal in Visual FoxPro. With over than 28,000 registered users worldwide, is affectionately known as "El Portal del Pueblo" (People's Portal). More info regarding PortalFox can be found at:
http://www.masfoxpro.com/PortalFox
Pablo Roca – Microsoft Visual FoxPro MVP
La Coruna – Spain
Sysop from:
