>Hi there!
>
>It is quite clear to me that it will be best to re-design my whole application so it will make use of object-oriented techniques.
>
>But besides that I am interested in what I have to do to convert a 2.0 DOS application to 5.0 so it works and looks identically (as much as possible) to the old version. I think e.g. of a DOS compatible monospaced font so the forms look like before.
>
>Can you help me with detailed information? Thanks a lot.

This can get extremely complex and depends entirely on the individual situation. Here are some of the issues that we encountered:

First, we wanted to just go to FPW2.6, however our app didn't run "out of the box" and would entail a decent amount of recoding, sufficient enough that it made more sense to try and go to FPW. First problem we hit was memory problems. any SAVE SCREEN bombed in a big way under FPW. Fonts were screwed up and not easily fixed, and and random GPF's for absolutely no apparent reason.

our app compiled under VFP w/out much problem, a couple of minor changes here and there. the trick was that we still use FP2.5/dos to maintain our old screen files and then copy the .SPR file into the VFP source directory. Then at the beginning of the application code, set the default screen font to FoxFont. This gives you the Look and Feel of foxdos.

Now you will have to deal w/ some printing issues. You can print your old fox/dos reports, however if you do you will need to print them to a file with the ASCII command and then copy them to LPT1 (or wherever). The other option is to convert all of your report files to VFP which is not that difficult, but can be a little time consuming if you guess wrong about the fontsize on the report (you will need to reconvert because just changing the fontsize will screw up the spacing). The other option is to do all printing via SET PRINTER ON. I think there's some ??? command that tells windows to send the printjob as is) Also, under windows you no longer have the capability to turn off formfeed after printing a report (to print multiple reports to one page)

The best thing to do is to rewrite the app, but sometimes that's not a valid option (need it now, not 2 years from now as was the case w/ our legacy app)

Hope this helps some...

robert