>Does anyone know if MS will actually typecheck the declarations or are they for cosmetic purposes the type declarations in VFP7.

THey're not for cosmetic purposes entirely, they are sensed at designtime, which is what enabled Intellisense. So if you were to delcare a variable as another class, or a COM object, VFP will figure that out, and then gather all teh properties and Methods and anythign else it needs to drive Intellisense.

You can change the type of a variable, because they're are just as the have always been, Variants.