Dave,

>Several of the Fox team have commented that they have been paying attention to the many requests that have come in from the community, so who knows?

I would've surmised as much. I've had the opportunity within the last year or so to swap a few emails with Randy Brown on various issues. His responses have been of such a nature that it's obvious that they're listening to the community. I'm only sorry that I'm not at NOLA to thank him for his both his patience with me (there've been more than a couple of exchanges< g >) and for the obvious interest he's displayed in this area.

>My guess, however, is that priority first goes to new language enhancements and architecture changes necessary to participate as fully as possible in COM+. As various changes are made, the need arises for new functions and commands or enhancements to the old, so they just take a minute or two and add them. :-)

I think it's important to point out that many of these changes are made possible by the port to Win64. As I've mentioned before, you don't just re-compile the old stuff. This is the perfect opportunity to implement this stuff.

>A lot has been said here about the changes being made to support Active Accessibility, which are quite extensive. Every UI element -- form, textbox, button, grid, cell in grid, etc., has a COM-addressable identity through the "IACCESSIBLE" interface, and can be queried by outside programs for that information.
>
>Outside programs can receive events triggered by user actions, and can keep up with where the focus is on a form. Outside programs can talk to the UI elements and tell them what to do, such as telling a command button something like "DoDefaultAction", which would be a click of course.
>
>All of the IACCESSIBLE stuff is there to support a major Microsoft initiative related to people with disabilities, but there are many other interesting and innovative uses for it, such as automated testing. And I'm sure that in usual fashion the Fox team and Fox developers will find some very interesting other uses for it, too. :-)
>
>It's hard to tell from the very fast demos which of the new items are for Accessibility and which are for COM+. For example, we saw a new array property that is added to each property, similar to the way ACCESS and ASSIGN are named. This was seen inside a CLASS definition:

MyProp=0
>DIMENSION MyProp_comattrib(4)
>MyProp_comattrib(1)=COMATTRIB_READONLY
>   (MyProp is now readonly)
>MyProp_comattrib(2)="MyProp Help String Text"
>   (that text shows tooltip-style in the new Object Browser)
>MyProp_comattrib(3)="MyProp"
>   (this allows capitalization of property name to be preserved)
>MyProp_comattrib(4)="String"
>   (property type)

We saw the result of these settings in the Object Browser, but they probably were added for IACCESSIBLE. My guess is that Microsoft's directive for their products to support that standard has given the Fox team plenty of ammunition for other features. :-)

The above is very interesting (not to mention impressive).

>Just from what we've seen so far, I have to agree with Craig that this will be a MAJOR release, not just a minor upgrade.

See above for the reasons. BTW, why aren't you in a session...or did Gonzo keep you out late again last night? < g,d&r >