>>As I understand, the compiler runs inside the current VFP IDE - is this correct?

Chen supplies VFP Menu options so you can activate VC.exe from your IDE, but it's a separate process. You can run in unattended mode or with a GUI so you can tweak settings- you have *heaps* of options apart from VC choice if you're into that sort of thing, including whether you want to retain the VFP runtime library, compression/encryption of exe and/or dll, debug modes that track behavior during compilation or at runtime, levels of decomposition and obfuscation, whether to encrypt calls again at runtime as well as various MAKE parameters and the list goes on and on. The defaults are mostly pretty good, but if you want to be a perfectionist you can save your config as a .vcf for each app, to be double-clicked/invoked as needed to compile again the same way.

Recompilation is a *huge* process, since VC analyzes all your code and variables looking for decomposition and obfuscation opportunities, converts all of it to IL prgs and then sucks all the good stuff into a C++ dll leaving a bare shell in VFP. It can take a while, so we designated a build machine that can grab all latest work from TortoiseSVN and then run a script for unattended compilation of one or more apps. This is fully documented and easy to implement.

>>Do you have a replacement for the VFP IDE 9? Is this the 64-bit VFP?

Yes, his VFP Advanced 64-bit is an IDE with lots of bug fixes, including phantom trace points and search dialog lockups- and now defaulting resource file location to %appdata% where it belongs, not the VFP Program Files folder that has been wrong since XP and gets blocked by UAC. One fewer thing to worry about!