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Cathy Pountney: Workaround for Data Group bug

Cathy's posting a workaround for the bug she reported earlier with Visual FoxPro SP2 but the deafening silence from the Redmond camp is kind of annoying. We all looked forward to having a single solid release of VFP from which we could build solutions around - but one that wouldn't be introduce major new problems from previous versions.

Cathy Pountney: Gotcha: Workaround for Data Group bug

Now I suppose one could argue "why didn't this come up in the beta test" but this brings to bear the entire issue of a "public" vs. "private" beta. In my mind, with a Private Beta, users are far more likely to be critical of functionality and not bring on a list of "I want" items. Sure there will be a few - but most developers and users I know of in "private betas" are well-aware that by the time a product goes into "Beta" - the feature list has been locked down and now it's time to fix bugs.

When you release a "public beta", even to developers, you've immediately open yourself up to "why can't it do this" or "I want it to do this", stuff that can take time away from just about everyone on a project.

Now when you look at the Microsoft Connect site, it gets a little more interesting.

There are items that have been reported as Resolved since the release of SP2 but there's no comment about HOW they've been resolved. Does that mean there's a hotfix coming? Or are these items being fixed (somehow) with Sedna? (which still has not yet been released)

It seems Cathy was right about "if enough of us complain, they will address it." but we aren't seeing HOW it's being addressed just yet.

One thing I did notice - is that there is no easy way in MS Connect for someone to pull up all the VFP issues so one thing that would be useful woud be for everyone to preface their bug reports with VFP SP2 (or VFP, at the very least).

While I wouldn't expect MS to continually issue fixes for bugs as they come up in VFP, some of the issues that are being reported are big enough to warrant a hot fix , in my mind. As I said above, I don't mind having a product with known bugs (that have been in there for a while) that we have to work around but regression testing aside, I don't think anyone expected any loss of major functionality. Has anyone heard how these items will/won't be resolved?

Comments

Anonymous said…
I posted a couple of new-to-sp2 bugs. One (re the Help file glitches) I haven't heard back on. The other (which was easily repro'd) got this reply a fortnight ago:
--------------------
Product/Technology - Visual Studio and .NET Framework
Feedback ID - 306321
Feedback Title - OBJTOCLIENT()

The following fields or values changed:

Field Resolution changed from [External] to [Won't Fix]

Field Status changed from [Active] to [Resolved]
------------------------

All in all, I don't know whether to be pleased they're doing _something_, or worried because if they aren't prepared to fix a bug which can be easily repro'd what are they going to do about some of the other, less easily pinned down, bugs?

Apart from that I don't know whether to laugh or cry about the whole situation ...

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