Shedding Some Light

One of the great things about the MVP Summit is the discussions with MVPs outside of your core group. In my case I had the opportunity to talk with someone who is an Outlook MVP about some of my Outlook headaches. She is pointing me to a tool to help me migrate my PST file to the Outlook 2007 format. Christof Wollenhaupt told me to expect my file size to double because the file is upgraded to support Unicode and this takes twice the bytes. He also told me I should be able to see the Russian spam easier. Cool. This is another thing I was wondering about. When I read Web Mail on my Windows Mobile phone I see the Russian character set, but in Outlook it looks like garbage text.

The other thing I learned is an explanation for something that has bugged me about Outlook, but not something that has affected performance or organization of the PST and the 2GB limit. Each time I do a send/receive pass I see the message “Sending Message 12 of 12″ even when I do not have any messages in my Outbox. I have always thought this was a bunch of return receipts clogged in my Outbox, but I have guessed wrong. This is a bug. It has a direct correlation to the number of email accounts I have set up in Outlook. If I add a new account it would say “Sending Message 13 of 13″. This must be a seriously pain in the neck bug to figure out, or simply not a high priority, because I know the bug has existed as far back as Outlook 2003.

The MVP Summit completely exceeded my expectations for many reasons, but mostly because of my interaction with the other VFP MVPs and the Fox Team. Microsoft did not schedule a single session for the VFP MVPs so we decide to make our own. I learned several things and felt the trip was well worth the time and cost. I had to work at night to keep up with the project schedules so it really was an exhausting week.

There is one thing I want to address publicly that I feel is important. I have been reading many comments in the community on how the Fox Team has been disbanded and how they have gone their own separate ways. How they have abandoned our favorite developer tool and our community. Yes, this is partly true. Each of the developers, the testers, the management, the Help file folks, and the marketing team (no jokes please {g}) have all gone on to do great things in some other part of Microsoft and the entire team is not working full time on Visual FoxPro. This is part of growing as individuals and making moves in one’s career.

But one thing I realized and something that should have been very apparent to me all along is this small group is still the Fox Team no matter where they go and no matter what other projects they work on. The group as a whole and individually have been smacked with a virtual baseball bat over the last year, yet they still managed to correct the Help file’s missing index items and correct an annoying bug in the reporting system. I think this says a lot about the individuals involved. They listened intently with an open mind to the bugs/issues in SP2, and have left open the door to improve the SP2 experience and its adoptability by FoxPro developers. They all showed up for the product team dinner including Fox Team members from the past who long ago moved on to something new. Even someone who was on vacation and may have wanted to celebrate a birthday with the family came to spend time with us. Any one of them could have spent the time with their product groups, but choose to come to ours.

My hat goes off to the entire Fox Team and their dedication to Visual FoxPro and the Fox Community. Thanks for your efforts.

Alan Griver spilled the beans today that Microsoft has some fixes for VFP 9 SP2. Alan announced the missing index items in the VFP 9 SP2 Help file are fixed and being reviewed, and will be available online sometime soon. The “Fox Team” has already fixed one report bug when the preview toolbar becomes unusable in the “new style” report preview. The fix is done and is going through the packaging process before being released to the Fox Community.

This is absolutely great news and a step in the right direction to help with the adoption rate of VFP 9 SP2.

There is more good news as the “Fox Team” is open to possibly fixing more SP2 regression bugs. No promises were made, but it is encouraging news that the serious bugs are being considered. It was a positive meeting and a good day.