Work on educating Microsoft about the importance of Visual FoxPro is active and ongoing. To educate the marketplace, a letter by me was mass-mailed from Microsoft to FoxPro customers and others within the U.S. You can read it at http://foxcentral.net/microsoft/vfp7_letter.htm. Please forward this address to anyone who might be interested.

In the next few months, you'll see lots of news items, whitepapers, resource documents, and more on the MSDN Visual FoxPro home page at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro. Also in the works is a complete redesign, similar to the new Visual Studio .NET Web sites. So, be sure to visit the VFP Web site weekly for new information.

VFP 7 SP1

Visual FoxPro 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) provides the latest updates. It contains various enhancements and stability improvements which are documented with the download. SP1 also includes a number of other changes to improve the reliability and performance of Visual FoxPro 7. An updated VFPCOM for VFP 7 is also available.

Whitepapers and case studies

New whitepapers and case studies for VFP 7 will soon be added to the VFP Web site on MSDN. Look for "Using ASP.NET in Visual Studio .NET with Visual FoxPro 7.0" by Cathi Gero, and "IntelliSense in Visual FoxPro 7.0" by Daryl Moore and Andy Kramek.

A new detailed Evaluation Guide for Visual FoxPro 7 will also soon be on the VFP Web site. Case studies for VFP 7 are in development and will be posted on an ongoing basis. If you or anyone you know has a good potential case study for VFP 7, see the VFP Web site for how to submit it, or contact me at klevy@microsoft.com.

Microsoft will soon be conducting a new online Web-based survey targeted at Visual FoxPro developers. If you receive an invitation to participate in this survey, not only will you be eligible to win cash and prizes, but you will be helping Microsoft and VFP marketing better understand the customer base and how to increase overall customer satisfaction.

Next version of Visual FoxPro

The next version of VFP is code-named "Toledo," a name selected by the FoxPro community just before Visual FoxPro DevCon 2001. The main top-down goals for Toledo are to provide a better rich client, improve distributed Web client features, improve developer productivity, and increase discoverability for ease of use. You can see that the product direction focuses on features VFP developers have requested.

Visual FoxPro 7 includes a high-performance runtime language/database engine that is COM-based. The VFP 7 data-centric language is tightly coupled with the database engine. The architecture for Toledo will remain the same as the previous version of VFP for performance and technical reasons. Toledo will continue to use the local fast FoxPro runtime engine in unmanaged code, rather than move to the managed .NET runtime.

Toledo will not be part of Visual Studio .NET and will not compile to the .NET common language runtime (CLR) engine. VFP is a language, a database engine, and a development IDE all in one. Having the FoxPro language compile to the .NET CLR would mean removing most data-centric commands, then using VS.NET and not VFP to do development, thus eliminating some of the FoxPro language, the VFP database engine, and the VFP IDE. VFP 7 is fully-compatible with .NET via XML Web services and has a new OLE DB provider for great integration with VS.NET and ASP.NET. And we're working on improved SQL Server connectivity for Toledo.

To see a sneak preview of Toledo, watch the online video from Visual FoxPro DevCon 2001. You can find links at the Microsoft Visual FoxPro Web site and at http://FoxProAdvisor.com. A release date hasn't been announced, but it won't be before Visual FoxPro DevCon 2002 this Fall, so be sure to upgrade to VFP 7 now, if you haven't already.

Ongoing community involvement

I continue to educate the Microsoft field offices and representatives worldwide on Visual FoxPro and how to discuss it properly. If you encounter any Microsoft people providing incorrect information about VFP, e-mail me so I can educate them to avoid the mistake in the future. Please also e-mail me if there is a page on the Microsoft Web site that doesn't include mention of VFP, but you think it should.

The FoxPro community is a great example of how developers work together.

Be sure to join your colleagues, the Microsoft VFP team and me at Visual FoxPro DevCon 2002, September 29 to October 2 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Go to http://Advisor.com/event/cmx0209 for details. Visual FoxPro DevCon 2002 session information will be announced in upcoming months, but for now I'll say that you should expect this event to be bigger, better, louder, funnier, happier, and more interesting -- including exciting announcements and big surprises!