>Microsoft is doing a presentation here in SLC in June called "Microsoft Development Tools A-Z." I will be doing the presentation on VFP and will have about 10-15 minutes. My only requirement is that I end up with a COM object at the end of the presentation. That'll take about two minutes. Any ideas on what I can do to fill the rest of the time?

Thought about this a little over the weekend, and came up with what I consider to be VFP's greatest feature when it comes to COM programming: the command window.

I would show how easy it is to develop your COM server as a VFP class, test and debug as a VFP class, and then compile into COM server with confidence that your object already works, and the only thing you'll really have to debug through COM is DCOM instanciation, and security issues.

Show how easy it is to instanciate a VFP class (and then a COM server) in the command window, and test it interactively, using ? to show output.

oCust = CREATEOBJECT("MyCustomer")
?oCust.GetCustXML(10101)

and then, compile into COM server:

oCust = CREATEOBJECT("MyApp.MyCustomer")
?oCust.GetCustXML(10101)

Show how easy it is to test other COM and automation servers (not written in VFP) in VFP, using the command window, by showing functionality interactively:

oXMLDOM = CREATEOBJECT("Microsoft.XMLDOM")
oXMLDOM.Load("c:\somexmldoc.xml")
oNode = oXMLDOM.SelectSingleNode("MyXMLNode")
?oNode.XML

VFP doesn't have much of an advantage over the other VS tools when it comes to the kinds of COM servers it can build (in fact, it is overtly disadvantaged in many areas), but I think it has a huge advantage in the arena of testing and development. Show it off.