Hi George,

snip

Those are the kinds of "choices" offered up when someone really doesn't want to do something about a problem - like the public services Administrator who always picks on 'the peoples' favourite programs when cost cuts are threatened. It truly is the lazy person's way out of a problem.

Hell, FP got famous doing what others said couldn't be done! VFP actually delivered a OOP developers tool against strong odds.

The point is, "miracles" CAN be accomplished when one's heart is in it. And what you mention are hardly "miracles"!

Where there's a will, there's a way. In the case of VFP, there is no (demonstrated) will to accomplish these things.

As to the original subject of this thread, the VFP "Future Directions" paper has been updated and now specifically mentions '1 and 2 tier'. That could be a great thing inasmuch as the thread title is concerned, but frankly I'll wait to see something in real life before I believe that. Since it appears that many of the known problems in GUI functionality of VFP 5 remain in VFP 6, I take that as further "proof" that the VFP Team's work on the GUI aspects of VFP is severely lacking. There has been no indication that this is about to change.

I can't, for instance, recollect anyone here crying for 64-bit VFP. Yet you suggest that that is on the way. The same can be said for VFP 6's OOPification of the PROJECT, of its Component Gallery and of its Foundation Classes.

People here can offer any number of reasons why things are the way they are. I still am anxious to hear reasoning from the mouth of MS/VFP Team itself.

Regards,

Jim N

>Hi Jeff,
>
>I'm going to stick to Juan's original message regarding the API here in my response. There may be very good reasons for things being the way they are. For example, if the messaging issue is due to VFP using non-standard controls, and to fix it they had to give up the ability to bind the controls to the data, would it be worth it? For a few it might be, but I'd speculate that for most of us, we'd say, "No, no, no! Leave it the way it is." If, to gain pointers, they had to give up the memory management currently in place and it caused a significant performance hit in data manipulation, I think most, if not all of us would say, "Ain't worth it."
>
>Now as far as other issues, we may see some of things we've been asking for in 64 bit VFP. There'll have to be a good deal of re-writing done, so who knows what'll come of it. (I'd still like an independent DE object, but let's not start that again:-)).
>
>Regards,