David,

You are right, of course.

But that doesn't mean that these should be my "regular" routine/pattern for EVERYTHING. Even you say "rarely".

One issue which came up recently was ISRLOCKED/ISFLOCKED. This has apparently been KNOWN by MS since VFP 3.0 BETA. Yet the manual has changed not one iota!
Another is SET REFRESH which CLEARLY states in the Help that it is applicable *only* on BROWSE. Yet lots have observed that it seems to operate more widely. Would it be so hard to lay out the REAL storey on this one?
Yet another is FLUSH - does it do *anything* on buffered tables??

There are countless little things like this, ALL OF WHICH MATTER LOTS IN THE OVERALL SCHEME OF THINGS.

The KnowledgeBase *can* be helpful, but frankly, how many "examples" have you tried that worked EXACTLY AS PRINTED? In my case, NONE! always some little buglet/mistype somewhere! How many "HOW to. . .s" are actually real-world How-to's?? They really are "one way to. . ." and generally only apply in the theoretical, not practical, case. Finally, how many articles end with "working as designed"??? Why do I learn this in a KB article - isn't the Help *THE* place for such stuff???
In summary, the KB needs lots of improvement too. Right now it's a poor excuse/substitute for GOOD HELP! And it doesn't matter tht other platforms may not have KB services - we might just as well not have one too most of the time!

I don't want to have to go through 7 layers of well-intentioned but non-warranted assistance before I get to the authoritative source (Help files are #8 in your list). I want the Help files to be #1 and anything else to be required/useful for "dire-straights (straits?)" situations.

Regards,
Jim N


>>PS I do think it is stretching things just a tad to call the MS site "part of the online Help". I consider the online Help to be the Help that comes with the product and which is available to me with a hit of F1 (or its equiv. click).
>>
>
>Maybe looking beyond the VFP help files shouldn't be necessary except on rare occasions, but I'll accept solutions for problems anywhere I can find them. I think that the resources available for VFP programmers are probably better than any other database product. If what I want to do can be done, I can always find answers in one of the following places:
>
>1) In the stored 50,000 VFP messages in the Universal Thread or by posting a new message.
>2) The Microsoft Knowledge base
>3) The Microsoft developers network CD (or in MSDN on the internet)
>4) The various Compuserve forums
>5) http://www.ping.be/~ping0150/webboard/webboard.html
>6) http://hexadec.com.sg/cgi-local/Forum/bbs_forum.cgi
>7) Third party books
>8) The real help files on VFP
>9) The real Microsoft manuals
>10) Only on extreeemly rare occasions - from a living tech support person