yag: Community and Architecture

We just posted the following to the VFP site. I'll write more later: A Message to the Community We have been asked about our plans for a new version of VFP. We are announcing today that there will be no VFP 10. VFP9 will continue to be supported...

Since we made the announcement, I’ve been reading comments on this blog and others as well as various community sites like the Universal Thread . The comments have ranged from the good to the, er, not so good <g>, to the challenging. I’ve also personally...

I've been reading the comments here and on some sites about SP2. I wanted to give my point of view about it and ask for a few things from the community. Milind, Calvin, Aiwen and I have been going thru the reports and trying to reproduce them here...

We've figured out the Vista border issue (we think). We couldn't reproduce it here, but Jim Slater noted that it happens for him when he changes the bordertype in the init. As Calvin mentioned in these blog entries: Windows Vista Aero BorderStyle Paint...

Had a few more questions come up. I'm still at the MVP summit, but keeping up as much as I can. What about the MVPs? The MVP program is tied to the communities, not to the products…so to the extent there are active/vital communities, we would expect...

As some of you have noticed, we had a bug in our SP2 release. We forgot to update the file with the splash screen in it. Nice getting back online to messages about it. My thanks to those of you who mentioned it nicely. <g> Anyway, Milind and...

Well, the news is finally out . SednaX is moving to CodePlex . I'm really excited to have the community helping to not only move VFP forward (as a number of efforts are doing), but also to help us get our new site tested. My thanks to everyone involved...

This is a copy of a post I left on the VS Data blog. Sorry for the dupe - but I want folks who are new to this blog to have context: ---------- As many of you know, after a major release, people at Microsoft tend to look around to see what they...

When I left the developer division a number of months ago, people were curious as to why. I explained that this new gig was one that kept me awake at night thinking of all the cool things we could be doing. I wrote a little about this when I first joined...

Doug Mahugh has a post where he took an existing VFP9 app that uses a lot of Office Automation, and ran it under Windows Vista with Microsoft Office 2007. We're doing a lot of testing of VFP with Windows Vista (especially for SP2 - part of our Sedna efforts...

Now that SP2 is out, you can go ahead and download the free ActiveX controls being made available by our friends at DBI. The controls include the following: ctTray Offers developers direct access to the standard Windows System...

I’ve been spending some time in meetings and doing some thinking about how we can start to combine some of the great resources that we have here at Microsoft. One idea that came up today has to do with machine translation and blogs. We already do...

Sean O'Driscoll has a new blog that I think will be a really good one. Sean is the General Manager of Community Support and MVP, and I work closely with him and his team. He has a post up on community transparency and the driving forces behind it. He...

I said earlier that I wasn't really ready to talk about how I feel about the announcement. I did, however, post something on the Universal Thread last week in response to a question that a few folks have told me I should post here. Interestingly enough...

It may take around a 1/2 hour to propogate to all the servers, but it's now online.

I'll be speaking at a conference in Frankfurt, Germany on November 8-10. I'll be keynoting the VFP conference and doing a session on VB.NET (including things like LINQ, Silverlight and future releases). This is one of my all time favorite conferences...

I'm still drinking from a firehose, learning all about working in this new world that I find myself in. Had a meeting with an architect in MSDN search - turns out he used to work in Fox support - he used to recommend Codebook a lot. Small world. Anyway...

Doug posts a question about how you handle accountability in a Scrum world. If the team doesn't meet its iteration goals a few times in a row, what happens? I just wanted to post this hoping to get some more people involved in the conversation there....

Jim Wooley just posted a great entry on his ThinqLinq site. It involves using Linq to XML and VB9's XML Literals to query Shakespeare's plays. He first joins all the plays on his drive together into one big XML file and then gets the top 50 characters...

Here's a great post about blogging and its usefulness in corporations. The quote I wanted to point out: What did Microsoft do? I don't know if they had it before, but it takes certain organizational cultural values. It's not about process, or rules...

So, let’s talk a little more about my new position and what it means for Visual FoxPro and the community. As you know, I spent the last few years as Group Manager for VS Data – that meant that I had two major products that I worried about: Visual Studio...

As stated in the latest monthly letter , we just shipped Service Pack 2 (SP2) for VFP 9! You can download it here . We've also made the bug list available . The source code to the VFP and VB.NET components will be made available next week. My thanks...

I was interviewed by Level Extreme for two of their online magazines: .NET Magazine and Universal Thread Magazine. In the .NET Magazine interview , we talked about my new position here on the Communities Team, .NET in general, Linq and a number of...

As I prepare for my new gig at MSCOM, I’m cleaning up things from my current position – archiving emails, making sure sharepoint sites are updated, things like that. I’m also preparing for my trip to Devteach next week (with a quick stop at VTDotNet on...

Ken posted a while back about his “monsters of rock” group of folks at Live. Well, I feel the same about the new team that I’m working with. Every one of them is as crazy about community and customers as I am <g>. Here are a few of the folks I’ll...