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The Waiting Game - again...

It's funny how product development works. You work on a tool for so long that you almost forget when it came out. Visual FoxPro 9 was released in 2004 - a good 3 years ago. I recall back in the Advisor Devcon in 2001 when MS totally blew their opportunity to introduce DotNet into the FoxPro community. It was too bad.



But even now, when I was doing the FoxShow  with Rick and Markus and others about which version of Visual Studio to get into, the issue about which version continually came up. You could learn the ADO.Net from earlier versions, or you could wait for Orcas (still waiting but it's a lot closer). You could use Winforms or switch over to WPF (just about there) and now, from Info week, we get



How Long Will You Wait For Silverlight? - Microsoft Blog - InformationWeek



suggesting that it won't be available until the spring of 2008.



It's a tough call for developers - do you develop in the current tool of the day (which today would be VS 2005, even though I do know of a few shops that still won't deploy a DotNet 2.0 framework just yet) - or do you jump ahead into the future, KNOWING that while you might be able to deploy with a beta version, it's a tough call to make - knowing you might get a lot of paper cuts from earlier software.



But in some ways it works - many FoxPro developers made the jump to DotNet early on and are now reaping the benefits of it. But it still is a tough decision to make - especially when you've got Products to build and work with.



The seeds for Foxfire! 8.0 was first started back in late 2002 when a challenge was made as to whether "could we do this...." - it just got released this week but it doesn't stop there - there's more to do - more features to add to a new version.



And yet sometimes developers lose focus of what customers really want - "something that works"



Will they wait?





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