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

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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.