Hi Rod,

>Hi Jim
> I do believe that there will need to be a day when we drop the backward compatatblity with some of the old commands. We have had three versions of keeping these commands around. This bloats our deliverables and my guess is that it slows performance un-necessarily.
>
I don't think that bloat is a real issue any more. Don't know about the performance part. You could be right there, though there is no way to tell for sure.

>As for dis-infranchising older developers this has happened already. Most of us are guilty of being OOP zealots telling people that they need to OOP everything. This in my opinion was where we lost a great deal of people.
>
Yes, I'm sure many were lost there for sure. But is seems to me that there are still lots (as witnessed by the banter here) that are still in FPD/FPW or who are using VFP in that 'old' style. I just don't think we can knowingly lose any more than we have. I also remain convinced that we lose many newbies because of the quality/content/accuracy of the documentation supplied with VFP.

>Here's a question for you (and everyone else) What's wrong with using the Form designer and the native controls ???? Do we really need to create classes.
>
That's the way I started and, after a less than satisfactory start with classes, have backed off to learn still more before I try again. My chances are diminished now (and since the last 10-12 months) because my prime contract is not VFP.

>When I came into VFP I was already a VB programmer. I already knew about PEMS and was ready for OOP. What about people that were new to VFP. They had to learn OOP, DBC, PEMS, ActiveX and a bunch of other stuff. We should have started with just the Form Designer and said start here. Learn OOP later. For those comfortable with OOP, hey dive in.
>

I agree that that would have been far less traumatic for the newer VFP folk, though I feel that the more experienced FPD/FPW folk were chomping at the bit to get deep into OOP. I was, and even though I went slower than the average bear, I still screwed up!

>This is a little off the track of your message but something I have been thinking about.
>
>Thanks,
>Rod

Cheers,

Jim N

Damn - I tried to italicize your statements and leave mine normal, but all turned out to be italics despite coding gt-than i/ lt-than around only your lines!@#$#@~