>It's a whole new ballgame now with VFP on its own, huh?
>
>What are the odds you see on some of the following:
>
>OO report writer
>Fixed View designer
>OO Menus
>
Jay,

I won't attempt to address these in order or comment, much, on the possibility of their being implemented. Rather, I'll throw out some of my thoughts, in general, on the subjects.

OOP Reports

Probably not very high. Due to backward compatibility issues, I'd say that this is pretty low. You might see some things done with Crystal Reports, but in regards to the Report Designer, not much.

Here's a thought, however, that might prove a bit more likely. A report object to wrap a report. Through this object, we might be able to control, for example, the Print Preview toolbar, or be able to reference custom properties via something like: This.Parent.Property.

View Designer

Are there problems with the current one? Yep, but fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your POV), they're not ones that I encounter because of the nature of my work. There are workarounds, such as Erik Moore's eView.

I'm reminded of the early days of VB, where they archictecture allowed for the add-ons that became ActiveX controls. In this instance, rather than addressing that, I think it would be much more beneficial to give us a visual DataEnvirnoment object to manipulate. Of course, this is prejudiced by my own work, where something like this would be a great help. As I see it, right now, the data is a function of the form/report and, IMHO, that's backward.

OOP Menus

Everytime someone mentions this subject, I usually pop in and say, "...but menus aren't objects in VC++, so I don't think it's very likely that you'll see them in VFP". There's really more to it than that.

Menus are very often application specific, and as such, there's little to be gained over the current methodology except to say, "Well, they're OOP". Good design can make what's currently available as re-usable as they would be if object oriented.

Frankly, what may be one of the most overlooked/under utilized features of the current menu system is that it's LIFO stack based. Being an old bit-head (assembly language programmer), I can appreciate and utilize that to give me what I need.

JMO,