Hi!

My personal opinion about all this is not very optimistic. There are 3 options in relation to grids:

- persuade MS VFP team to improve grid control or create a new one that is better.
- write a book about VFP grid and describe many things from the VFP community experience and personal authors' experience
- create a super-grid component that will contain a lot of features.

My opinion that the most beneficial from the marketing point of view is the first thing. Unfortunately, it is beneficial only for MS <g>. there was a thread a long time ago where I proposed to do the same by MS. Whe MS afraid to break existing features for grid control and be compartible in new versions of VFP, I proposed to create just a new grid control that is better. So, existing applications will still work the same, when new applications will have advantage to use new grid classe with much more features.

About the book - it is not clear how many people will read it. I guess, with this book, we're balacing somewhere "between" usefullness of such book and being afraid about fact that only one single control in VFP (where there is much more things exists and worth books!) is covered by the entire book. In addition, take into account that this book should not be just about the grid, and as a result, its name should not ontain "grid" word, or should contain it as a secondary subject of the book. The book should be about the use of VFP controls, code, database data, components, ADO recordsets etc etc with grid, as well as OOP approaches for development of forms with grids and similar things. Just a tech book with covering all omissions, defects, weirdness and solutions with grid is not enough and, for sure, it will not be a good one. So, the book would be "Numerous things about use of grid and other controls in building applications" or something like that.

As you see, all around the book is very dependent on how it wil be represented and oriented.

Also, it would be good to have some sort of survey to get the opinion of many VFP community folks. Yet I see no more than 10 people opinions, that is not enough, of course.

About the super-grid class library - personally I think it will take a lot of time for development. So its cost would be around $200 - $300 at least. Would youbuy such class library just to have smart grids? What if MS really will go for first option? Then there is a risk about it. And it seems it is not possible to get any feedback from MS about what they going to do to do not recreate the wheel (I asked in the past about another useful things for VFP, and still no feedback - I do not know start to create them or not, because I do not know if MS going to create them).

As you see, the subject is very complex and consists of many factors.

Any suggestions now? Any advise where to go and what to do now, or should we do this at all? Maybe, leave the food for such sites as Universal Thread, so users will just ask about grids here and thats all? This might be the forth option ;))) <vbg>


>Hi,
>
>Since I've been attending here in UT, it called my attention the high number of messages related to issues concerning grids: a search in the message's area for the word "grid" just this year (4 months), searching in title only, returned more that 500 messages (limited by the UT search engine).
>
>Recentlly Vlad Grynchyshyn even proposed to write a book about grid's usage, and I salute his great initiative (please see message 637133 - "Your opinion about writing the book about VFP grids"), I think that's needed because on how cumbersome, complex, problematic and featureless is VFP's grid class. Of course we can use other grid objects (purchased or not) and avoid those problems and limitations, some of us (how many?) already mastered it.
>
>Question: couldn't the VFP team implement a grid class, that could fulfill VFP developers' needs, usually posted here in UT, and make it richer and easyer to use? (I'm aware there is a wish list, just want to know your opinion!)
>
>Fernando
>
>PS: I got encouraged to post this message (related to plain vanilla programming issues) after seeing the UT VFP Survey, where it can be noticed the high number of folks developing desktop apps (Single-user desktop: 16%, Fileserver based multi-user: 52%, Fat client with database server: 15% - totals 83%). It seems to me that not everybody is programming web apps or web services (Web-based with fat client: 2%, Web-based with browser: 10% - totals 12%), that (seems to me) is deserving most of VFP team's attention.