I've been working on an application written in VFP 6 for a long time. As such I've missed some of the newer developments that have gone on in versions 7, 8 and 9.

Recently we upgraded the application to VFP version 9. One of the new features I had fun finding out about was the use of .APP files for reporting. Without them, there was no printing.

So the problem was solved by the development team by taking the files that make up the .APP and compiling them into our EXE.

My question is about that approach. I look at it and say "if there was no good reason to keep it external, Microsoft would have put it in the runtime themselves and avoided all this". So my development team compiling them into our applicaiton seems to me, (and let's keep this between us) short sighted.

I'm wondering what other opinions are out there. Is compiling it in a good idea?

Other useful informaition would be any examples of how people are leveraging these external files (and why they are external). In my reading so far, I haven't gotten a clear idea of why this was done.

Thanks as always foxites
Or would that be foxians. Perhaps foxfans. Foxers. Hmmm...