Help Us Create a Better Visual FoxPro 9.0 (by John Koziol)

Edited: 3/16/2005 by John Koziol

Bug reporting is now via an email link. See this article for the link and information as to how to submit a good bug report:

  https://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;867477&spid=3019&sid=global

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(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: https://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?  https://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=/support/vfoxpro/report/report.asp&sd=msdn See something which you can explain but you don't like? https://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.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 10, 2004
  Just a clarification: if there is something we can explain but don't like, should we use the feedback link or the bug report link (they are both on the same page)?
  
  thanks,
  
  Hank
• Anonymous
  June 11, 2004
  What's happening with good old Access and DAO/Jet engine?
• Anonymous
  June 14, 2004
  I think there should be a method or event in a Grid control that allows you to fetch additional data on the fly.
  
  Explaination:
  
  I use VFP as the 1st and 2nd tier in a 3 tier setup, SQL Server is the 3rd.
  
  I fetch data based on a SQL query and save the result in a cursor or the SQL Server. I retrieve the fist 10 or so records and display this information in a Grid, as the user scroll or pagedown on the Grid and reaches the buttom of the Grid I want to fetch additional record for another screen/Grid full of information. Can this be addressed in mod to VFP
• Anonymous
  June 16, 2004
  As I pointed out in my entry, stuff like this should be posted to http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=/support/vfoxpro/report/report.asp&sd=msdn