>Hi Jess,
>
>First of all, I want to say that I regard stability and the number of bugs two different issues.
>Stability, at least for me, means that the program does not crash into a state you cannot recover from it. For example I have submitted a bug where the Windows menu display two empty bars for each and every LEADTOOLS controls have been instantiated. A bug? Certainly yes, and certainly an ugly one for me. But to say that it degrades stability? No, I would not say so.

Are you saying that bugs don't directly offset stability of a software? That stability refers to fixing C5 errors only? You must explain more in a technical perspective that stability don't have any relation with bugs.

>
>In my eyes, the VFP team mean with stability, they made VFP less susceptible to C5 errors for example, and reduced other threath in where VFP is left behind in a unrecoverable state.
>
>Second, yes I agree there are some nasty bugs in VFP9 that have kept me from using it. We did a test of converting our application from VFP8 to VFP9, but we had to revert again to VFP8 because of some very annoying bugs, which I reported to the VFP team. FYI, they had nothing to do with the VFP9 reportwriter as we are still planning to use crystal reports instead. At least we confirmed that the bugs were solved in SP1, so I credit the VFP-team at least to listen to us. So yes, I think our product will be upgraded to VFP after the release of SP1 unless we encounter new problems.
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>I can confirm as fabio says there are a lot of bugs in VFP, together with design mistakes. Not all of them are critical and some can easilty been workarround. Others are so obscure they will not likely been encountered by most developers (Fabio is a master of recovering those). Having programmed with VFP since FPD 2.0, I realize there is no such thing as a bugfree program: We have to live with it.
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>Every release I've worked with had some problems, and I always appriciated a SP because it always solved problems that that were hard to workarround with. As for your vote for the worst version. I can remember that VFP 6.0 (without a SP) was a terrible release. It took at least to SP3 to get something usable out of it and finaly ended up with SP5.
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>For all subsequent versions, I recall that I have never released anything of importance within a new version without an SP (maybe VFP7?)
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>Walter,
>
>
>>The claim of MS that VFP 9.0 is the most stable release they have so far is now in question to me. Why? SP1 has some 200 bugs fixed and they're coming up with SP2 aside from SEDNA which I guess will also have lots of fixes included. Worst, many of the reported bugs that were fixed are obvious and basic bugs which in the first place shouldn't be passing through first level of debugging. Reading the list of fixes of SP1, we have one bug that is so important to us that is not yet fixed: can't recognized legal size paper for some printer i.e. EPSON LX 300+, some HP Laserjets... We are then forced to set report behaviour to 80 which is awkward.
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>>Is VFP 9.0 the most stable version or the worst version released since 3.0? Whatever your interpretation in this question of us, we are still using it and in fact our system might be integrated with MS Navision come 2006.