Last night I received an e-mail in which someone asks to sign a petition to have Microsoft put XQuery support in the .NET Framework 2.0. Now I would like to support a good cause, but before doing so, I would also like to be sure what it is that I should support. A litte digging is in order. Now I do know something about XQuery, but since it's not natively supported in .NET 1.1 there always seemed to be other ways to get somewhere.
So what's this e-mail then? Well, appearantly some marketing consultancy firm picked up on the result of the VB6 petition. They were hired by DataDirect, the division that develops Stylus Studio, part of the Progress Software Corporation. In the e-mail MVPs are asked to sign the petition.
And by the looks of it, many MVPs already signed. Or have they? Wait a minute. There a quite a few MVPs, and surely I don't know all of them. But the Dutch MVP community is not that large and the Dutch names on the list do not seem familiar. Many of the names (Dutch and otherwise) are not listed in the MVP directory. So what's this. A scam? A form of miscommunication, a computer glitch, misjudgement?
While it may have been done with the best intentions, the way this call for support is set up it will amount to nothing. It looks to me that the marketing firm saw the effects of the VB6 petition and decided to go ahead and copy that. It won't work, especially when you make everyone signing the petitition an MVP.
And as far as my opinion for XQuery support is concerned? Well, I do understand why Microsoft does not want to support a not-quite-yet-a-standard in the framework. And I'm sure that when it's final, Microsoft (like they did with Web Services) or any other firm will gladly offer an implementation for .NET. And they won't be the only one.