Hi Ed

You have helped lots of times. Once it was a real life saver:)

I am not sure what this chap is all fired up about, your answers are always spot on as far as I can see.

If he is having trouble with one of your answers then thank god I didn't answer him:)

In fact it puts me off answering questions a bit. I will sometimes if the answer is obvious.

Sometimes if I see folks are hanging around waiting for an answer I will tell them what I know even if I am not sure. I qualify my answer so they know it might not be correct.

Thing is lots of folks in here have reason to be glad of your help so don't think of leaving the forum.

You are needed here:)





>>Hi Ed.
>>
>>>> FWIW, this is a pretty good indication that I should not bother to reply at all; about a third of the time, I'll suggest a block of code off the top of my head, and frankly, I'm not in the habit of giving away my work product because someone I have no business relation with asks a question and I can provide a useful answer, but it isn't worth spending half an hour to test and debug code that ultimately they're going to charge their client for. I'm lucky to have the time to re-read and remove typos. So the solution is don't try to help. <<
>>
>>I hope that you aren't serious about that. It would be a geat loss to this place if you really mean that!
>>
>
>Well, it appears that people don't want anything that isn't banged on until it's exactly what they want. Since their specs are vague in most cases, and I don't have the time or inclination in many cases to post more than pseudocode, or generalized snippets intended to illustrate an approach related to what they're stuck on. Generally, we don't have the actual environment required for illustrating exact working conditions. Quite often, the user doesn't even provide real code that didn't work - they pose hypotheticals, or 'sanitize' their problem. On occasion, it feels like we're up in the Klondike mining for gold, afraid that if we tell too much about what we're doing, someone else will jump our claim and steal the gold.
>
>Face it, exposing a few real variable names, or even the actual names of some tables and fields, isn't likely to provide enough information about the full extent of your project to let a slimey, despicable and thoroughly dishonorable potential competitor to steal away your pet project. It's unlikely that if they put all the effort into studying every one of the threads looking for an opportunity to sneak in on a project and steal it away from you they'll have much time for actually learning VFP...
>
>And cut and paste a small block of actual code, sticking in a few comments to explain what's being done is generally easier than creating an adequate synthetic and sanitized chunk of similar code to ask the same question. And in some cases, the sanitized code hides the actual problem, eg using a variable name "b" to hold an object and then having VFP get confused about if it's a variable name or a work area alias...
>
>A good share of the time I see a post and decide to play with it because it looks "interesting". I may post pseudocode, or chop out a chunk of code from a library, or write a QUAD function to handle it because it piqued my interest. If I find something neat, I may post it. The idea is it's a neat piece of code that someone might want to play with. It's rare that I spend the time to bring it to the point I'd expect for my production code - adding error checking, more extensive commenting, overriding unwanted native methods of a base object, etc. I invest the time to do this when something seems worthwhile to me to hang on to. But there's a lot of Win32 API calls that I do in autopilot mode that I don't hang on to - but I'll bet there are a lot of people who don't keep the DECLARE for PostMessage() along with a couple dozen WM_ parameter values hanging around on their fingetips. Conversely, there's code that I've got squirelled away, commented, ASSERTed and error checked for Grids
>that you can knock out with your toes with a bad hangover. What's obvious to one person isn't to another.
>
>For my sake, please post stuff off the top of your head when it seems appropriate; I get far more benefit playing with Grid problems starting from a piece of nearly-good code with a typo ot two or a missing DODEFAULT(). I don't expect that everything I see posted on UT will be the pinnacle of perfection, flawless and totally free of danger. That's my opinion. I've had enough people take me to task for not error-checking a snippet, or putting up a function that, if you tried hard, could hurt yourself, or < heavens > contained typos. I've gotten the impression that these people (who, for the most part, don't ever post any code that someone else might be able to use) are mortally offended by my fallability, and by my attitude that I know a lot of stuff, in nearly equal measure. And they're even more offended that I don't think much of their opinions... < g >
>
>I wish there were a flag the poster could set to indicate "Any help appreciated" vs "Don't reply unless you have absolutely flawless, immediately usable code that you're willing to provide free tech support for at your expense forever", so that I could figure out when to post SWAGs, pseudocode and first-cut fragments to address problems. Unfortunately, that's not available here. So it seems like a good time to sit back and watch for a while.
>
>>>> Oh, well, time to find somewhere else to contribute. <<
>>
>>You can always get to Compuserve MSDEVAPPS from the web < s >
>>
>
>Much as I hate C$i, it may be time to go there or the newsgroups...