OK

>I was not clear enough - Ed's MD5 is a fll based on MD5 in C and some other goodies for hashing in C++, so speed differences to API might be there but probably are less prominent than those compared to a vfp-language implementation ;-)
>
>>Depends on the speed you need. I have an MD5 in foxpro - the performance is sufficient for passwords and the like. You don't have to check passwords that often
>>
>>Then, I made something that upon startup checks whether there's a newer version available. If yes and the customer wants to download it, I download the new exe. I then check the MD5 of the exe I downloaded and compare it with the MD5 that is stored on the website.
>>
>>A vfp implementation that has to calculate the MD5 of 6 Mb file takes 6 seconds. Using the api it takes 0.05 sec
>>
>>AES is also possible with windows api (with IV, ECB/CBC, paddingmode PKCS7 ) and it's faster than a native vfp implementation
>>
>>________
>>
>>>Thx - had not realized that. Pretty certain that the API version will not be less performant than the other 2. OTOH secondary reasons like needed version testing speak for "my" mentioned solutions of vfp-sys() function or special dll as nothing needs to be tested on all different OS targeted. Ease of distribution speaks for using vfp-sys as no foreign dll needs to taken care of. OTOH having access to the implementation of the algorithm as is the case in the MD5 on Leafe might tip the scale for some - at least for me not needing to depend/believe in case of trouble is a definite plus even if I will procrastinate quite a bit before really loading a debugger with the debug version of said dll ;-)
>>>
>>>>There's also the api implementation of md5. For larger strings (and files) this outperforms the vfp implementation
>>>>
>>>
>>>>>There is a MD5 implementation on Ed Leafe's site which has better performance - not sure which function has theoretically more overlap.
>>>>>Or you can combine both functions as in Sys(asAbove, F5) + MD5(F5) as F5MemoGrp - need perhaps to cast the results into Char-Types.