Shedding Some Light

I saw this posted on Andrew MacNeill’s blog first (but also reported by almost everyone else I subscribe to in the Fox Community). Microsoft has released the VFP 9 Service Pack 2. We talked about this last night at DAFUG after Cathy Pountney’s excellent rehearsal for her Southwest Fox session “OutFox the VFP Report Writer: Printing on My Terms.”

Head over and read Milind Lele’s brief note on the release. A couple of notes, this is not the release of Sedna (the Xbase tools and .NET extensions to VFP 9). This will be released separately. I am not sure why these were released separately, but can guess that there are some legal issues to be ironed out to get the Sedna code posted on CodePlex under the shared source license.

One small typo in Milind’s letter: he notes about not installing this over one of the “betas.” He correctly instructs VFP developers to not install this over a CTP or beta. You need a clean install of VFP 9 RTM (release to manufacturing with no service packs), or the VFP 9 SP1. The typo is the word “betas.” I am a little surprised that Microsoft only released one beta for this service pack. Sure we had a few CTPs along the way, but those were definitely alpha releases. Alpha releases are made before the feature set is finalized. Even under the normal service pack release process we saw a beta and release candidates. Throw on top of this the concept that this could be the last service pack released I expected at least one release candidate after the original beta. I am a little surprised we only saw one beta.

Last night during Cathy’s presentation she ran into a bug under Vista where right-clicking on the method code editor freezes VFP after the shortcut menu is displayed. You can break the freeze several ways, but definitely a pain in the neck and not something I see in the list. Maybe it was fixed and overlooked in the bug list, or maybe I missed it in the list.

I am hopeful the Fox team listened to the posts about bugs and did some fantastic internal testing. Fingers crossed. Now I have to determine if I override my “no installs” two weeks before a conference rule and get this loaded before Southwest Fox.

After reading an email from Microsoft today about the two Window Vista logos I decided to ask Milind Lele if VFP 9 SP2 was going to be logoed with “Works with Windows Vista” or “Certified for Windows Vista.”

Milind said VFP 9 SP2 will get the “Works with Windows Vista” logo.

If you want more details on the logo you can head over to the Microsoft Vista Logo site.

I know several people have been blogging about this today, but the long awaited beta is released and you can get it here. I wanted to comment on one thing on the fix list I did not think was going to make the cut:

VFP9: Debugger: ToolTip for character variable in the TRACE window no longer has quotes around the value. Did in previous VFP versions.

I know this might feel like one of the small things in the life of a developer, but it still throws me each time I see the quote-less string. Thanks Fox Team! This one has “bugged” me for a long time! The entire list is extensive and impressive. Looks like we are going to have some fun over the next couple months.