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Updated: A Microsoft evangelist talks to Paradox developers (in 2004) and rips FoxPro

Who is this Frank Fischer, MS .NET evangelist of Microsoft Germany, anyway?

I found this by doing a technorati search for FoxPro - this was on the first page - obviously they are pinging the right blogs if something from 2004 was listed on the first page.

The Fox Team should do something about MS "evangelists" spreading their words. While Ken and everyone else is stepping away from declaring Sedna a "release", this guy actually says:

* Q: What about Foxpro ?
* R: We are forced by customers to maintain it. We have an eight-year commitment to maintenance. But don't move to it: it's a dead-end. Use VS instead.

(of course, he's a DotNet evangelist but he could have worded it a bit better).

Interesting comment though: Until Longhorn, .NET is built on top of COM. Starting with Longhorn, the building direction is reversed: COM has been rebuilt on top of .NET


Tag: FoxPro

Microsoft talks to Paradox developers - Riff Blog

Comments

Anonymous said…
I wouldn't say he "ripped" Foxpro: this guy seemed mostly enthusiastic about spreading the .NET word as the überanswer to anything, even Microsoftian.

Also, as you can imagine, at a meeting of Paradox developers just trying to figure how they would recover from XP SP2 partially breaking Paradox, everyone was rather irate at MS and its two products competing (for want of a better word) against Paradox being themselves not broken by the same SP2.

From him, mentioning this 8 year commitment (although reading you it appears to have been 9 years at the time) was a valuable point to make to Paradox users, who are rather left in the blue by Corel about the future of their beloved IDE. But of course ... switching to VS.NET was the preach of the day.

But frankly, I don't begrudge him: it was a nice effort to try and meet such an audience for MS.
July 2, 2005 at 6:28 PM
Andrew MacNeill said…
I can certainly appreciate how Paradox developments must feel...my daughter had to do a university assignment that required Paradox- do you THINK we could find a copy? (no way - had to redo it in an open source tool instead)

And it may simply be the way the original post read.

Thanks for the comments and you're right - it was good of MS to try and talk to the "non-converted"
July 3, 2005 at 7:14 AM
Anonymous said…
This is certainly something that may cause hilarity somewhere within MS: although Paradox is still actually available, at least in part of the EMEA region, it seems to be almost impossible to buy in the US and Canada: although we are located in France, I've had requests for it from both US and canadian buyers.

Quite impressive for a US/Canadian publisher like Corel.

Fox does not seems to be in the same quagmire, even if it is not central to MS product lineup.
July 3, 2005 at 5:00 PM
Andrew MacNeill said…
Note quite in that quagmire - but close.

Consider these stats - Fox use in europe and Asia abounds when compared to the US.
July 4, 2005 at 8:12 AM
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