Developer Division LeaderSpeak, subset of blogs.msdn.com

Similar to the way the blogs.msdn.com web page summarizes recent blog entries from people on the blogs.msdn.com/ domain, there is also a related Developer Division LeaderSpeak page which summarizes the upper management team members who have their own blog on blogs.msdn.com. From the LeaderSpeak page...

Many members of the Developer Division leadership team are blogging their plans for the division, and the products they are responsible for. This page gives you the ability to see what they are planning and insight into the direction for Visual Studio and the related products from now, through Whidbey and Burton, and to the future.

Currently at the top of that page (the latest entry), there is a blog entry called The New FoxPro by the brand new blog just started by Rob Copeland. Rob is the Product Unit Manager at Microsoft for the Rapid Application Development Business Unit (RADBU) which includes the VB, Windows Forms, and VS Data team. Also on the Leadership Team Bloggers list is Alan Griver (yag) who is the group manager of the VS Data team which includes the Visual FoxPro team. So the organizational chat from me goes up as follows: Alan Griver, to Rob Copeland, to Craig Symonds, to Soma, to Eric Rudder, to Steve Ballmer. I was a contractor on the Visual FoxPro 3.0 team in the mid 1990s when Rob Copeland was a program manager (PM) on the VFP 3.0 team. Rob was responsible for the new Xbase language features added as well as some controls and other features in VFP 3.0. During that time, Eric Rudder was the architect and group program manager for the VFP 3.0 team. Here is an excerpt of Rob's recent blog post on VFP 9.0...

FoxPro has a special place in my heart. I was an employee at Fox Software when Microsoft acquired the company. That's how I ended up here. And, FoxPro was the product I used for my first "real" programming job (one that I got paid for). I'm incredibly excited that FoxPro is a part of my team More...

There is a separate LeaderSpeak RSS XML feed for those interested in subscribing to the blog entries from the developer division leaders.