As you may know, the April 2008 version of the VFP 9 SP2 Help file is broken. Actually I would consider it a serious mess. Lots of cosmetic things broken, and hyperlinks broken on important things like properties, events, and methods. I blogged about many of the problems found. A real mess, literally unusable, and not much hope from Microsoft to get it fixed by the Help team because of resources.
Several people (who will remain nameless at this time) started working behind the scenes to fix the Help file by decompiling it, repairing the problems, and rebuilding it. Some of us allegedly got closer than others and there allegedly was lots of collaboration, but one person allegedly made a serious breakthrough with lots of time put into getting it corrected.
I contacted Alan Griver and asked if a Help file allegedly was fixed, would Microsoft post it for the Fox Community to use it. You see, there are lots of legal entanglements with copyrights and third-parties and no one wanted anyone to be thrown in jail. It took a while and I was starting to lose hope.
A couple of nights ago Alan emailed me with the news that we can post the changes on VFPX under the Creative Commons license. This means the Fox Community has the rights to improve the VFP 9 SP2 Help file! Some final tweaks are going to be made to the new file, and one additional fix has to be made, but soon a usable VFP 9 SP2 Help file will be posted.
Thanks to Alan Griver for spending time battling Microsoft Legal and going to bat again for the Fox Community. Proof again that even though there might not be an official Fox Team at Microsoft, we still have friends who are helping us out. And thanks to all allegedly involved in the battle to assemble the Help file without some key source files. You know who you allegedly are and you folks rock!
This is excellent news. Thank you for spreading the information with the community, as well as, your efforts pursuing this.
…and Hello from San Juan, Puerto Rico
You, Alan, and all your anonmyous help-ers rock, Rick!
You should perhaps delete “allegedly” out of your vocabulary for a while
, but good news, I spread it to ms.public.de.fox
Bye, Olaf.
You, Alan, and all your anonymous help-ers rock, Rick!
Good job, buddy. The VFP 8 and 9 help docs were a project near and dear to me and I spent many a weekend hour obsoleting old entries and re-writing new ones. Glad to see the community step up but not surprised; they always do.
Thank you!
Just found the link to this on UT – good news!
(dragan here
I trust the help file will include stuff that Lisa/Colin Nicholls did for SP2
The first release is just going to be the Microsoft content, fixed.
The Fox Community will be able to add material, including Lisa’s SP2 reporting material if she decides she wants it added.